Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry. If we accept that it reduces carbon emissions by 6.7 million tonnes per year, then that works out to €447 per tonne. That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.
I do recognise that modal shift towards rail may have other positive externalities, but I don't know how to price any of them.
Focusing on the cost-per-tonne for carbon reduction misses the broader value of railways. They're not just about reducing emission! They facilitate daily commutes, expand job opportunities, and help drive the economy. It’s a subsidy for businesses too.
"These things aren't important unless you can wedge them into my spreadsheet" is the time of consultant-brained nonsense that got us the world we're living in.
I believe that this idiotic short-sighted minmaxing (mainly due to the conservative party) has led to many of Germany's current infrastructure issues. Laying fiber? VDSL is cheap and has been good enough so far. Renewable energies? Importing Russian gas halves CO2 emissions compared to coal and is way cheaper (surely Russia would never think of abusing the dependence). Maintaining the railway network? That would cost money, and it wasn't broken yet.
We spend public money on things that are almost impossible to put a concrete value on all the time. Parks. NASA. University subsidies. Animal welfare. The list goes on. "How much are we willing to pay" is entirely subjective and can't be produced by a nice clean spreadsheet.
If you could make a park for 5 million dollars, or the same park for 3 million, you would do the latter, would you not? Then you'd have 2 million left to do something else with.
Because that is the comparison being drawn here. A valid objection would be that there are other axes that are material but are not being considered when we reduce the question to dollars per ton of CO2 -- but arguing that we ought not even try to put a value on how we spend public money will not be a reasonable stance until public money is infinite.
Who's "we"? The public is mostly not made up of consultants and do not appreciate consultant logic being applied to everything. People would prefer to define values and then act on those values.
So you would be good with spending more money and even increasing total carbon footprint, if it just felt good?
Seriously, if you're not going to measure anything or use logic, I'm not sure how you can even call them "defined" or "values". It sounds like, "I saw it on TV/internet/billboard so it must be true".
Yes, because that is exactly how American cities are currently built today -- expensive carbon-intensive roads paved out to sprawling suburbs, the independent financial upkeep of which is not sustainable long-term. [0]
The costs for car-based infrastructure are also sky high: $1+ million per mile of new road, excluding constant maintenance in repavings, potholes, and drainage systems. [1]
From an economic lens, transportation infrastructure is a net gain to the economy. To me, there is no reason why public transit subsidies should be scrutinized on financials above and beyond how public roads are scrutinized.
If we recognize roads are useful, then public transit should be an even more efficient use of taxpayer dollars on mobility per infrastructure footprint costs alone -- even before carbon reductions are considered at all.
I didn't say that. The OP argued "Actually this is bad because the cost per ton of carbon saved is higher than some other way to save carbon."
The original replyer pointed out that "ways to save carbon" are not necessarily fungible and there are other benefits to subsidized rail travel. The followon dismissal was to throw back and come up with a way to "price" those other benefits.
What I am objecting to is the entire chain of thinking that starts with trying to do simplistic, reductionist price comparisons and then refusing to consider other factors that don't fit in the pricing exercise.
No. This is something Texas is having to come to terms with right now. Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better.
So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to cities on either ends of the line while still being a relatively accessible commute for anyone in between the cities.
And of course as great as that is, the rail line will be able to relatively trivially scale capacity by adding more trains to the same line at a rate far above massively expensive road expansion projects that cost comparable to the entire planned rail line.
So if you want to grow past a certain density you do have to start switching to rail and higher density does mean more business opportunities and generally greater options for prosperity for the populations in the area.
Is Texas "coming to terms" with it, though? Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be. If your goal is to have everyone work in downtown Dallas then yes, they suck. But you can just build offices and manufacturing facilities all around the state instead, avoiding the creation of single bottlenecks.
Good comment except for the first word. Obviously cars enable all sorts of movement and economic activity, so why not just admit it? The rest of your comment is just talking about how rail may do all those things to a greater extent than cars. You don’t need to deny benefits of cars, it doesn’t bolster your arguments. Better to just be honest and then extol the virtues of rail and other transportation methods.
Of course a car does, but does that mean you should ignore all the benefits brought by bicycles? And if we go that far, should we overlook our own muscular locomotion? It all enables the same mobility after all.
Anecdotally, I frequently take day (or weekend) trips to other European cities by rail. It is usually quicker than the roads but also crucially you can be productive on the train. If I had to drive my car there then I probably wouldn't bother.
This reminds me of this Swedish office on a train https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HbrI3refig , made for a company which had an hour train commute from Stockholm. It's even got 8 telephone line (4 in and 4 out)!
I guess a lot of people would use work booths/conference rooms on trains, but the price/profit has to work for both sides (the train company and users). As for trains, the old-fashioned 6 seater compartments offer more privacy for groups.
This is an aside, but I’d never seen that “Beyond 2000” show before.
Retro future is a favorite topic of mine, so thanks for sharing.
Yeeesh though, re: part 2 of that episode, it’s wild to watch people in 1988 articulate the looming threat of global warming, and to hear them say on this 25 year old program “we’ve known about this for 30 years”
you could also work from a car if someone else is driving it like a taxi, but imagine the price difference to travel such a long distance every day over rail versus metro + rail.
Another point I haven't seen mentioned much is safety. Rail is vastly safer than cars and results in less strain on the medical system.
Europe is not exactly the standard bearer for productivity though, is it? If one wants to advance an argument for emulating European style passenger rail, this is really not the right argument.
Trains scale better than cars in dense areas and offer more than just emissions reductions. Good rail infrastructure is a big part of makes a large city world-class and improves everyday lives. Subsidizing trains is better than a lot of other uses of government funds.
Cars destroy walkability, cyclability, ability for kids to freely play outside, enable sprawl (hence more energy consumption hence more carbon emissions).
There’s no free lunch with using more surface area, which cars greatly expand people’s ability to consume.
True to a degree but cars also make parenting easier: you get bigger houses, bigger backyards, don't have lug your kids around on public transit, deal with the weather, don't need to worry about rail worker strikes, etc.
All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Do bigger houses make parenting easier, do bigger backyards? I’m inclined towards a large communual yard (a park, if you will) being many times more efficient at keeping them busy, especially if you have a single child.
Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not. They’ll be exposed to a variety of people and situations they’d otherwise never experience.
Similar thing for the weather. I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that any kind of weather limits their options if a car is not available.
I realize my opinions might be different if I were living in a US city, just wanted to give a different perspective.
The other great thing about public transport is you don't have to "lug" / "chauffer" them at all after about 8 or so (what age makes sense depends on area and the kid of course). They can exercise some independence.
Maybe that's true in small, peaceful countries like Denmark, but in the US children "excersising some independence" would likely be kidnapped, raped or killed.
This has never been significantly true, and becomes less true every year.
The probability that any given child will be kidnapped or otherwise threatened by a stranger is minuscule compared to the chance that they will be abused, kidnapped, or killed by a family member.
>All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Laws and sidewalk curbs don’t stop a giant SUV/pickup truck driven by someone looking at their mobile at 40mph in a residential area.
And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down. Those arterial roads basically box in your kids’ roaming area.
How much of the increased rail use is helping increase GDP, though, rather than being purely leisurely trips with little long term value for the economy? More people going to hike in the forest on the weekend technically increases GDP but doesn't add much value to the economy overall.
Keep in mind there’s only about 50 miles of high-speed rail in the U.S. so far. With major cities like Dallas and Houston or San Francisco and LA still unconnected by fast rail, there's significant room to boost GDP and improve lives. Expanding rail isn't just about GDP growth, it's about enhancing daily living and connecting communities more effectively. As RFK famously noted, GDP measures everything ‘except that which makes life worthwhile’. Rail development does both, supporting the economy and enriching our lives.
If I could take a train instead of a plane, I would. Doubly so if it saved me money. Savings for individuals means more money to spend on other things.
I find the word subsidy to be a possible weasel word here. I don't know all the details but a railway system has certain costs (fuel, personnel, water, upkeep, the trains themselves and so on) and takes in a certain amount of revenue (fares and subsidies, also food etc). It might be true that the government increased the subsidy in order to support the cheaper tickets. But that's not the same as "requires". Perhaps I'm splitting hairs but there's a strong danger of comparing apples and oranges if these things aren't spelled out imo.
I remember Brad deLong did back of the napkin analysis to determine how much a bart fare should be including the cost of freeways. It was minus $2.00 or something.
Calculating the subsidy associated with state maintenance of roads for private vehicles is difficult.
Some basic level of signage and hazard prevention (potholes, ice etc) is necessary for emergency vehicles and other government operations.
Thereafter, although there is some maintenance cost associated with the road wear from private vehicles and the additional infrastructure required for higher traffic volumes, we don’t have an easy way to calculate the cost.
Wouldn't the very patterns of development be different (and more amenable to rail) if the state didn't spend oodles of money building nice roads to make sprawl livable?
There is plenty of undeveloped land that people don't move to because there are no roads to get to.
We have more than a century of data showing that roads are subject to induced demand. If you build more roads, people move and sprawl (and take more trips in general) until traffic is once again unbearably bad.
If you build more lanes, more people move further out. Roads create sprawl.
I’m not sure if it’s the case here with Germany, but typically we refer to transit spending like this as “subsidies” but for some reason we forget that building and maintaining roads and highways and such are subsidies too.
In the case of the US and probably everywhere else, the highway subsidies are a little insidious too because not only do you pay a boatload of money for highway expansion you have to then go and buy an expensive car and fuel too.
Not much. A lot more comes from state funding, which can be anything from property tax to sales tax to additional fuel taxes. Because you pay about the same fuel tax per mile on a 60 mph road as a 25 mph road (but the 60mph road costs 100x as much), you also find driving on slow roads becomes a subsidy to building fast roads.
I'm not aware of any subsidies openAi has received. Did I miss something or is this one of the situations we're we are making up new definitions for words?
A contract isn't a subsidy... A subsidy would be giving them dollars without any particular strings attached except perhaps to use those funds to develop the product. If the contract is to provide money in exchange for services, that's called a transaction.
It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself.
The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized.
It’s important to call these out whenever they are because it means the program is not sustainable on its own and that puts it at risk during austerity, etc.
> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation. Yet rail is expected to not just stand on its own two feet but to yield a profit. Both facilitate commerce and improve a regions productivity (rail inarguably does so with greater efficiency, especially when integrated into a public transport system) - why is rail treated so differently?
Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on.
Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else is a deviation from that which requires extra consideration before it should receive any resources.
On the one hand that's also a lot of jobs and profits, but on the other hand if all this activity is in service of a mode of transport that causes considerable short and long-term damage, and is less efficient for many journeys, then it means we're wasting labor and resources that could be put to better use.
Or it is something that provides a benefit to society as a whole and therefore deserves to be maintained by the institution established by society to do such things, government, without assuming economic efficiency is 100% correlated with societal benefit.
Or maybe, governments have programs that are funded by all to benefit all, because they are onlt beneficial when they are society-scale? 1/350,000,000th of the US army won't be very useful to any individual American on its own.
Most of the value created by public transit goes into the land near the stations. Employers want offices near stations and employees want homes near stations.
You can recover as lot more money from taxing the land than from fares.
>The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
I'm German and I can tell you it really does not. Like in a lot of countries car infrastructure is treated like the state of nature, it's just somehow there, and the infrastructure burden of parking, road construction and what have you isn't a topic. It's the 'default culture' and the support it gets is just the status quo, when you try to internalize the cost you cause a shitstorm. Look at how well surge pricing or road toll debates go over in most places, or how sensitive people are to fuel prices.
Rail transport be it commercial or individual despite the fact that it's so much cheaper (in particular on emissions as well) is always one political decision away from being privatized or culled.
The far-right Berlin government is currently doing its darnedest to build the most expensive highway in all of Germany, that nobody actually wants, through a cultural area. Probably because their friend owns the highway construction company.
I don't see how any government, regardless of location, that spends large sums of taxpayer money on a construction project could ever be considered to be "right wing" in any way, let alone "far-right".
Such behaviour fundamentally contradicts even the mildest of right-of-centre ideologies.
An actual right-of-centre government would never even consider starting such a project.
If a right-of-centre government happened to inherit one that had been started by a previous administration, for example, such a project would be immediately terminated, any assets liquidated, and the proceeds directly returned to the taxpayers.
The only way that such a project would ever exist under a right-of-centre government would be if it were initiated, funded, built, operated, and maintained solely by the private sector, without any government involvement at all.
Practices such as the collection of taxes, raising public debt, and government built/run infrastructure are part of left-of-centre ideologies, and certainly not right-of-centre in any way.
Road vehicles are heavily taxed in European countries. I don't have the figures for Germany, but the UK spends £12bn per year on roads, while it collects £25bn in road fuel duty and £7bn in vehicle excise duty.
According to a study by the HTW Berlin, Germany collects €50 billion in road taxes and duties, but spends €30 billion on road maintenance and €30 billion on traffic police and road accident victims. Add to this an estimated €10-30 billion in environmental damage due to air and noise pollution.
I dont know how things are in germany but in the netherlands a lot more people own cars which slows down traffic.
All over the world they keep rebuilding congestion points only for traffic to increase.
If making public transport cheaper attracts more travelers there will be fewer cars on the road. The money spend on public transport will aso make car travel more efficiënt. Roads will last longer. Fewer upgrades are needed. Cars will last longer. etc
It is hard to picture how many cars it takes to move a train full of people.
> 7.6 percent fewer kilometres travelled by car.
> German cars were recorded to have travelled 582.4 billion kilometers.
That's why motorists should always vote for more public transport, instead of increasing road lanes - road per user is improved if you reduce the number of other cars
It saves the commuters the cost of buying a car, insurance, gas and maintenance. it saves building new roads and lifecycle costs of maintaining a road. Trains allow dense developments with a little bit of walking. Walking is healthy, a bit of exercise saves a ton on healthcare costs. Density makes everything cheaper. Carbon emissions are just a bonus.
The only carbon capture/sequestration method I’m aware of without significant tradeoffs outside of price is direct air capture, and last I saw, that clocked in at $600-1200/ton (Climeworks). So maybe not such a terrible deal?
I suspect the key is to find ways to run railways cheaper. It has been a long time since railways were under severe cost competition encouraging people to look for efficiencies.
I think the main one would be to find a way for railways to operate with no staff. Just like a typical road operates most of the time with no staff.
That means you need to redesign everything that currently uses people to not need people. Sure - there would still be occasional maintenance - but nobody always on duty driving trains (automated), nobody selling tickets (online), nobody cleaning stuff (automated cleaning of trains inside and out) etc.
In Japan, rail companies also own the land around the station. There is often a mall or office right on top of the station. So they capture a more of the value of having public transport.
In western countries land lords benefit a lot from nearby public transport for free and maybe only contribute in taxes.
Originally, rail worked kind of like this in the US too. Alternating squares of land adjacent to tracks were ceded to railroads, so you'd have sections of public land and private land beside each other.
I learned about this when someone was trying to make a test case of "corner crossing" from one patch of public land to another a while back.
You can be smack in the middle of Central, and then walk up a path behind the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and be on Old Peak Road hiking up to Victoria Peak. Or be in Wan Chai, take the stairs next to the Rolls Royce car dealer, and be on Bowen Road Fitness Trail and in Aberdeen Park within minutes.
HK island, New Territories, the outer islands and even large parts of Kowloon are predominantly green, parks and forests.
As GP mentioned, occasionally the subway operator MTR will build a new station, build a shopping mall on top, and housing for 50,000 people.
Opening the railways to competition has utterly ruined the UK's rail network. Ticket price has skyrocketed while service quality has fallen.
In the 30s, French rail companies begged and lobbied the government to nationalize them, so they could exit the burden that was maintaining a rail network.
Rail just isn't profitable, but is vital to society, and will become even more so as gas becomes increasingly expensive/lacking. Some things should just never be opened to competition.
According to GPT, the price per kilometre for rail travel is between €0.23-0.46 in the UK and €0.13-0.20 in Germany. I'm not able to verify those numbers but from my own personal experience I wouldn't doubt it.
Rail in the UK is just so bad that I stopped using it to go to the airport. Everything is constantly delayed or cancelled like I can plan a journey to arrive 2hrs before my flight and the train will randomly pause for 1hr when I'm half way... also the luggage situation is extremely stressful as the racks are out of sight and generally full, like where else am I meant to put my large suitcase after that?
It seems like trains are much larger in Europe with a lot of double deckers.
If there's two of us it's easier and sometimes cheaper to pay £100 for a taxi to the airport door to door (we're fairly rural)
When installed and kept up properly with good policymaking railways are always a positive for the economy. They cause a huge amount of cheap movement that increases business activity. Little towns that become railway stops develop much faster. The bigger stations are great for shops and food. The access to education and high-value driving extracurricular activities increase for younger people too. They overall make the economy resilient against all sorts of crisis (energy, markets)
The more railways are used for commuting, the less people are on the road. So it increases the road efficiency too and reduces degradation. Railways are great drivers of innovation and the technology they generate can be backported to cars, they are initial investment drivers.
However, the first if/when is a big one. You can half ass roads. You pay compensation for a pothole every now and then and make small improvement to get votes. You cannot half ass railways. They require constant maintenance and a whole mindset built around them.
Japan does railways correctly. China is getting there. The Netherlands is nearly a paradise of bike and railways. Germany isn't.
The countries with almost the same culture, Austria and Switzerland, care much more about their railways and invest them properly however their government aligns. Germans keep electing the right wing party with their ministers of ~BMW~ transport and then complain about 50% of the non-cancelled trains are late and the maintenance cost of the falling apart rail system is quadrupled.
At some point the train is longer than the station platform. Then you need to extend the platform, or passengers have to know that they need to be in specific cars to be able to exit.
I doubt that moves the needle a lot unless you're making _everything_ fully automatic, i.e. including the infrastructure creation & maintenance and streamline that extremely well.
If you take a ride from Hamburg to Berlin with the ICE, there's maybe 8 staff on board, 200-300 passengers, it takes ~2 hours and the average ticket price is 77€ according to some travel app.
Even if you get rid of all 8 of them, the price per ticket isn't going to be lowered significantly.
But there is also the ~80 staff manning stations at each end and along the route, and more staff in the control room, the cleaning staff, the people who manually do maintenance checks every single night, etc.
You can get rid of the cleaning staff right now. The terminals will become disgusting and people will stop using them. There is no way around this type of overhead. If you have larger numbers of people passing through, you need cleaning and maintenance.
Your original point isn’t even true - in California there is constant maintenance of the road network and crews of community service workers doing their sentence cleaning trash on the highway shoulder.
Lol, that depends heavily what you consider staff. E.g. look at freight, if you move cargo by trucks you need 1 staff member (sometimes called drivers) per truck. Train on the other hand needs only 2 people per hundreds of meters of train...
Even worse for individual car transport. You need one staff (driver) per vehicle...
Yeah, it seems that "self-driving trains" are a much, much more tractable problem than self-driving cars. On the other hand, the cost of the driver is amortized over many passengers, and much of the labor isn't driving but rather serving as conductor, etc, so it may not even matter too much.
> automated cleaning of trains inside and out)
For the outside, you can imagine a carwash.
For the inside, my brain goes to scary dystopian places. Like, "what if we make the inside out of chemically-inert glass-based materials, and clean it by immersion in pirhana solution?" One would just need to recycle the solution, and recharge it with hydrogen peroxide. This would rule out the use of plastics in the interior, however.
Maybe something more like a dishwasher could also work, but I'm not sure it'd be Strong Enough for Tough Stains. It could even just make a mess. I've heard stories of Roombas that encounter dog poop; they say it goes badly...
This analysis is too simple. Roads need to be maintained, road accidents are a burden on the national health service and air pollution has a long term negative impact on people's health
A more fitting complaint about cats would be the Pendlerpauschale, which is paid out to people driving to and from work in their car. It's a much larger sum than the €3b spent on the train ticket subsidy.
There are generally taxes (e.g., car or gas taxes) that cover the costs. I don't know about Germany's situation, but it is not impossible to make that net zero.
And these comparisons often exclude externalities like carbon emissions, pollution from tires and brakes, road accident costs, noise pollution and the cost of suburban sprawl.
If you would even attempt it to make it net zero you would get truly ungodly amounts of pushback, I don't think you understand how bad it would be. Truly, for those used to a privilege, fairness is an attack.
Furthermore: you have a state of affairs where you are pretty much forced to own and drive a car to e.g. get to work or move around. You make it reflect its true cost making it impossible to afford for anyone except the rich. What now?
Roads, highways and gas are massively subsidized, much more per kilometer travelled than rail. I think if you factor in spared road maintenance alone, from travellers using the train instead of their cars, you might see the operation is actually saving public money.
Germany actually subsidises fossil fuels to the tune of €20bn/year, so in that context €3bn doesn't sound so bad. Some of the latest estimates of the true cost per ton of carbon put it around $1000 USD, so in purely economic terms it's still a win.
The cost of carbon capture is not equal to the value it provides to humanity. In fact, not emitting CO2 that you could have, is even more valuable than CO2 you remove later from the atmosphere.
Well it's not just a carbon credit, it also provides subsidized public transport to everyone, reduces congestion, improves city air and likely cuts road deaths. Arguably tax dollars extremely well spent.
Except that due to this cheaper ticket congestion on trains is horrible and since the infrastructure is poorly maintained it’s quite common to be late by 1-2 hours while being packed in a sardine tin.
That's a matter of train infrastructure and frequency keeping up with demand. There's a big lag there. You don't just buy 100 new trains overnight. It's a symptom of ramping up. Not of high usage.
I live in Barcelona and here the metro comes every 2-3 minutes. Even during the night it might be 7 minutes. This helps so much with congestion but also trip planning: no need to check train times before you go. Id imagine busy routes in Germany could do similar.
The big benefit of this is also not needing a car. Not having to worry about maintenance, write-off, finding parking and the cost thereof, summer and winter tyres, damage, no-claim bonus, travelling while having drunk, going back from a different place than you arrived. It's so incredibly more convenient than having a car. All at a flat rate of 21€ here.I hope never having to need one again.
€21.35 for a T-Usual card which allows unlimited travel on all public transport for 30 days, yet you still have people in here kicking and screaming to use their car and roads
Disturbingly, your link includes Carbon capture and storage from a fossil power plant, which has never been demonstrated practically and is basically a scam at this point, pushed by oil companies.
Second, you are conflating subsidy with cost. If everyone switches to electric trucks, cost is enormous, but subsidy is zero because private sector pays for it themselves. For electrics freight trains, cost could be lower, but the government has to pay for it.
However, everyone with a grasp of physics knows that freight train is more efficient, so focusing on subsidy is stupid
How much does it cost to keep up the motor roads in Germany? Likewise, how much do the externalities of it (like pollution, and massive numbers of deaths and injuries) cost?
The system simply doesn't have more capacity right now.
Germany neglected or even removed their rail infrastructure, especially for the past 25 or so years, after privatization. These "subsidies" are a course correction.
These investments also make it a real pain to use the system right now, because a lot of lines are closing months at a time and the alternatives are already overloaded. I'd rather have a car for the next 5-10 years too - and I live very central with many connections.
Me and my wife are certainly considering getting a car. Cars are a pain in cities, but it would save literally hundreds of hours over the course of even a single year due to just how poor the infra is.
Maybe but it’s also subsidizing travel for people, possibly increasing revenue for tourist spots and restaurants, it could keep people from buying a new ICE vehicle etc. It seems like one of those things that has a lot of benefits outside the immediate situation.
Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Additionally, there are so many apps that resell the ticket as some white label system, so it was very confusing to purchase (you cannot buy them at the machines).
The price hike is the wrong direction here if we are reducing that much time on the road. Kudos though for the great rail systems. The USA has a lot to learn here and it’s baffling how terrible it is here. I doubt I’d ever need a car in Germany given the rail system was much more convenient. In the USA I spend 10-15 mins trying to park any time I go anywhere
> Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket
The Deutschlandticket costs max 49 Euros (next year it will cost 58€ per month) and is valid for one month for mostly all local®ional public transport systems (plus a few selected non-regional trains) in the whole of Germany. The subscription will renew automatically.
Companies often support employees by paying some of the costs. Then it typically costs 34.30 € per month. From next year on, employees pay 40,60 € per month max.
Here in my home city already 94% of the 213000 pupils use the Deutschlandticket for 0 € per month. Every pupil has free access to all of the country's local®ional public transport system... I find that kind of mind-blowing.
> Every pupil has free access to all of the country's local®ional public transport system... I find that kind of mind-blowing.
We've had this since the 1990s for higher education students. One of the known effects is that students who got it, used the public transport systems more often after wards as they were more familiar with it. I would not be surprised if Germany has a simmilar effect. The problem with these effect is they far outgrow the attention span of polititians as they take years to come to full force.
When I started studying at university it was an optional additonal fee paid with the Semesterbeitrag and the ticket was only valid in the city (not even the state) and its close surroundings. A bit later they didn't allow us to opt out anymore but lowered the price a bit.
> Studierende der sieben Leipziger Hochschulen im Zuständigkeitsbereich des Studentenwerkes Leipzig zahlen den Beitrag von 176,40 Euro verpflichtend mit der Immatrikulation bzw. Rückmeldung zum Wintersemester 2024/25.
I only pay 20 EUR a month because a 25 EUR subsidy by my employer. It is a total nobrainer although, I often even use it less, just because I can jump on any local train, tram, bus without worrying about a ticket (particularly as we don't have NFC payment). Actually the 9 EUR will effectively mean a 50% raise for me, so I am not sure if the raise even makes sense economically because people like me just would cancel.
For those not familiar with how this works/worked: At most universities, a similar fee was collected from all students. That was then used to finance a regional "public transport flatrate".
N.b.: mk89 is technically not quite correct, it wasn't free (nothing in life is). It's usually bundled with the tuition/enrollment fee.
Implementation details differed per University, but for us the fee (80 or 100€, can't recall) was socialized across all students and payed together with the tuition fee; opting out was not possible (with some exceptions, like disabilities). The money went from the University administration to the AStA - the "general students council" (the executive section of the elected student self-government). The AStA then negotiated with the local public transport company/companies as well as with the Deutsche Bahn (e.g. to get access to certain inter-regional train connections - we still have cooperations with 3 or 4 nearby universities, and students somehow need to get there).
Those negotiations can be a royal pita, and often the students were in a weak position.
Source: I was in the AStA (~12 people), but not involved with that task.
I have some experience with the public transport systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Belgium. In my opinion Germany's is the worst. Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. The tariffs (apart from the Deutschlandticket) are overly complicated and suffer heavily under the common balkanization.
The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
> For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
I am extremely surprised that you would write this. The SNCF Connect app has a lot of problems. Just for starters, it can't cope with any journey with more than 2 changes. SNCF shut down there international ticket sales computer system - because it was too old. They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF.
The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required.
"They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF."
I booked ICE trains run by Deutsche Bahn via SNCF successfully in the past, the last time three days ago. I had them even send me Deutsche Bahn paper tickets for no additional cost. (Not because I wanted them in paper, but because DB insists on their app or paper if it is not an international train)
"The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required."
You can plan that in DB Navigator just fine, but have you ever managed to successfully book such a journey. I admit that my attempts were always in the east-west direction, but I can confidently say that the DB Navigator app bails at the last step of the funnel for these journeys every time, when I can book the same trains via SNCF Connect just fine.
What I love about SNCF connect is that it shows me exactly if a train has free seats and is bookable in the inital step, where DB-Navigator lets me happily compose a whole itinerary only to tell me in the last step before payment one of the trains is booked out. Then I have start the whole process from the beginning, manually steering DB-Navigator to avoid the trains I now know are booked out but DB-Navigator still pretends were available.
I agree that the booking experience of the DB-SNCF cooperation trains sucks from the DB end, but the underlying blame arguably lies with SNCF which insists on compulsory reservations which is against the philosophy of trains in Germany. On the other hand, in my experience DB offers cheaper tickets for these cooperation trains, most of the time.
But these trains are a special case; in other cases DB is clearly far more pleasant.
This is not primarily a problem of the cooperation trains, I have the same situation with trains within Germany. DB-Navigator only tells you if a train is bookable right at the end, right before payment. Before that, it might show "there is high demand", but this is rather useless, especially when you have a school kid and want to book a train a the beginning or end of school holidays, when every train is in high demand. Your only chance with DB-Navigator is to play the whack-a-mole game where you run all the steps repeatedly until the very last step until you find a train you actually can book.
In the SNCF app I have this information right away, that is what makes the difference for me.
So much this. I often use DB navigator to plan trips within france. As soon as you're not going to or from Paris, the sncf offer and app are just terrible. Often, sncf-connect will refuse to offer me TER-only (regional train) trips, because one of the legs can also be done by TGV. Basically impossible to plan this kind of thing with the SNCF apps.
But even the basic UX is terrible. The most blatant example of this is the choice to make the first text input on the search the target station. If you do limit yourself to a single text input as the entry point to the search, I see the intuition. but the result is that they are the only transit search mask I know where I have to first type where I'm going, and then where I'm coming from. I hate it.
I don't know about apps (only used the HVV app, for holding a ticket), but in terms of websites SNCF (at least the English version, the French one is a bit better) is an absolute mess. There is like 3 different ones for starters, one to find a connection, one to buy the ticket and one to find current status/delays.
bahn.de is actually one of the more decent websites in my opinion (definitely better than most rail sites I have encountered).
That said, the biggest problem with rail in Europe atm, is the lack of an integrated ticketing system. Going between places by train is a so much nicer experience than taking the plane, but the ticketing experience is such a mess. As others have pointed out, on SNCF you can't find any international connections any longer (IIRC SJ.se in Sweden still shows connections to Norway and Denmark), on Bahn.de you can find the connections, but can't actually see a price or book a ticket (you are told to go into a station). Train travel in Europe could be a surely awesome otherwise.
One fun experience, arriving in München and trying to buy ticket for the airport train online. The app requires your birthdate. The date selector starts from present and only allows to go back one month at a time. So if you're 40 years old, you would need to click 480 times... We bought paper tickets from a machine . Machines work well compared to other countries though.
I can't tell for other countries, but SNCF digital solutions have been a great example of everything you should not do for as long as I can remember. Actually bahn.de used to be a far better interface to consult french train hours than whatever fancy new name SNCF would come every few months or so.
I couldn't disagree more. You can say a lot of bad things about Deutsche Bahn, but of all the travel apps I have used, DB Navigator and bahn.de were the best.
SNCF Connect, on the other hand, not only had a terrible UX, but also crashed randomly, forcing me to use third-party apps to buy SNCF tickets.
The DB navigator app is actually decent. The one downside is it kicks you out to a website to book many international tickets, but you can still plan and track your journey delays etc. in the app.
It kicks you out to a website if you are lucky (I had this when traveling through Austria), but often it just says: "Sorry, I cannot book this for you.".
In any case you will have to start from scratch, which is in my opinion the worst UX.
It is good that the app allows to research all theoretically possible connections, but I want the info if I can practically book a connection right there in the process and not just at the end. The SNCF-Connect app shows that this is possible, and even possible for Deutsche Bahn trains.
I just used the DB Navigator for extensive travel in Germany without any problems. It doesn't provide quite as much information about how to deal with connections for a delayed train, but that is minor compared to the very transparent function for buying and displaying tickets.
As a tourist I agree, and the Deutschland Ticket App is Region locked, so you are bound to the complexity of the system, which seems unnecessary and way too expensive as opposed to the ticket locals get.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible
It's not terrible. I managed to book all my train travels just fine with it, also using a business bahncard which gives me a 50% discount on all trains.
I couldn't pay for my ubahn with a credit card on the bahn, and the app required me to use some kind of a paypal derivative. I did not pay.
Regardless of whether it is digitized or not, regional trains suck. To pay on the train, I think I was forced to use cash.
Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email. Or was it snail mail? I didn't attempt it, I just saw that my train was delayed for hours with no explanation for what can I do about it, realized I'm missing my connection and then booked a plane ticket and got home faster than if I had traveled by rail without any delays. 10/10, will fly whenever possible from now on.
Pay before. That's how the transport systems generally work in Germany. In many trains you need to have a ticket BEFORE entering the train and also BEFORE entering the platform in the train station.
> Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email.
If you don't pay before, and the train doesn't have a ticket machine on it (most don't, but some e.g. trams in Berlin do) you are riding illegally. That's how it works in Germany.
> The DB app? Definitely was not an option for the people who did that.
Yeah, it's in the app.
> Paying before just isn't always practical, but I understand that such limitations are often a non-issue for locals.
That's how it works. Typical here for local trains: there are no barriers in train and bus stations. One can just enter the train and bus without any ticket check. But you have to make sure that you have a ticket. The local trains have no installation to buy a ticket anymore. Typically one would buy them online or have a subscription ticket. How does the system make sure that people pay and don't game the system? There are random checks.
If you want a ticket, buy it before entering a train. Train stations have either ticket systems or a ticket office. But most people by now do it online either per website or app.
For long-distance trains I would always book in advance (it's often also cheaper) and book a seat, too.
Yeah, cool, I understand, it is how it is done. I am not arguing that, and I already conceded that.
Why are you bringing the same argument back up again?
Have you considered that people who travel through your country will not install another app on their phone? I do not need another quarter of a gigabyte app to pay for something that could've been paid for via VISA or Mastercard. Oh wait, I did install the app. And it asked me to use a paypal account. I do not carry my papyal credentials with me.
I have never gotten on long distance trains and expected to pay on them, not what I am arguing about.
And when I mean that the app was not an option, I mean that in our case, we couldn't use the app to submit a return. I was not the one submitting those forms, I was too lazy. The people who did told me the app did not work for their case. Given that you've told me 2x that "you can just do it in the app", what else can I say besides the fact that when tried, it did not work? Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why?
All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?
> Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why?
The DB App has this option, now. That's all. If this information does not help you, there are other readers here, too.
> All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?
You can buy with credit cards (and a few other options) using the usual payment terminals. Again, you usually have to pay outside of the train. The terminals are at the train station.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
SNCF, SNCB and EuroStar let me manage my tickets digitally in my digital wallet. That is super convenient if you have more complicated itineraries because you have all the tickets handy in a single app, when you need them.
With Deutsche Bahn it is either their app or a PDF to print.
For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.
You can forget about that anywhere in Germany. It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.
That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
I did a more complicated trip with multiple legs. Booked via SNCF, bc DB-Navigator would not let me book some of the border crossing legs, I tried. The only leg that
required a paper ticket was in Germany. In 2023, not last century.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
While DB Navigator does leave something to be desired the sheer width/breadth of the DB booking system makes it my go-to choice for international train travel. They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips - from Sweden to the Netherlands - which I make about every other month. I can get prices directly without having to go through some silly booking agency, I can book tickets, reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want (something which doesn't always work). They did have some problems about a year ago when they moved to the 'new' DB Navigator and the price I was quoted suddenly quadrupled, this turned out to be an omission in the booking system which I submitted a bug report for. They fixed the problem and prices returned to where they should be (about 5% higher than before the change, they used the opportunity to raise prices...).
No, the problem with DB is not to be found in their app or the booking system, those are at least on par and often better than their foreign equivalents. The problem lies in the unreliability of the long distance network, especially the ICE service which often sees long delays due to a lack of personnel, defective equipment, maintenance work, etc. Regional services tend to be more reliable, in part due to the higher frequency which makes it less of a problem if a single train does not run. All in all I can live with the problems and have switched over to rail travel whenever I can in Europe. The advantages - more space, more comfort, no security theatre, the ability to hack away while travelling, usually lower prices, I can take as much luggage as I can carry (which is a lot) - outweigh the disadvantages - longer travel times, need to change trains, delays which compound due to missing connections.
They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours
There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.
which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips
That is something we can agree upon.
reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want
SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
> There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.
The way they implemented this process makes it easy and quick to get compensation while other carriers - who are supposed to follow the same rules - make it quite a bit harder to get compensated.
> SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
You can do the same on bahn.de or in DB Navigator (which is mostly equivalent to a canned version of the site plus a few extras). Not all trains allow seat selection, sometimes seats are assigned automatically. Other trains - e.g. Dutch Intercity trains - do not offer reservation at all. The Swedish/Danish Öresundståg (a service running mostly in the south and west of Sweden) theoretically allows reservation but this hardy ever works, at least when booking through DB. Do mind that I use DB to book trips crossing several countries using different operators, in this case SJ (Swedish state railway), Öresundståget, DSB (Danish state railway), DB, Eurobahn and NS (Dutch state railway). All in a single booking with a single payment and a single point of contact using a single ticket.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes,
It is for that reason I'd love it. Accessible, universal, sustainable,
resilient technology!
I once got stuck in Nuremberg overnight. The ticket office was open
all night and an official looked up all my options from memory and
timetable books and wrote me a diagram with pen and paper that
perfectly showed me how to get to my destination. I'll never forget
that helpful clerk.
Not saying you can't have your apps, but systems that lose touch with
reality and human involvement are part of the emerging problem.
For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian
and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious
discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and
allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper
ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses
and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine
used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket.
Simply genius.
> For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket. Simply genius.
I think you're giving a little too much credit. In the nearby Czech Republic we had a system where there'd be eight (or perhaps 10?) places for a hole. Your ticket would get marked with a combination specific to the vehicle.
They'd periodically change which vehicle has what holes. With 8 holes, 256 tickets would be enough to give you a valid ticket for any vehicle. With 10 holes, 1024 tickets. I think some people carried around all the tickets to be able to ride for free. Others kept tickets with small number of holes for later reuse in a vehicle which had a superset of those. Good times!
I find it very hard to believe the Hungarians has something smarter than that, but would love to be proven wrong!
>Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes
I want to buy a ticket every now and then. I want that process to be straight forward: cash money for one-time ticket. I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
Exactly, no one wants that, no one needs that, but you should recognize that most people don't want to handle cash money either, nowadays.
Just let me swipe my card or phone and done.
If you insist on privacy we should be able to use a pre-paid card or temporary credit card (like Revolut), but I have not tried that and I doubt it works.
I don't carry a phone around with me at all times. Phones are expensive, wasteful, socially and environmentally harmful, time consuming, and they erode our freedoms.
Sure. And how do you pay? I mean, really. You're forced to create an account, then link a payment method (PayPal and/or Visa/Mastercard may or may not be supported, Apple Pay almost never is). Sometimes you also have to link a mobile phone number or the number is the account identifier.
I’d love to see an in-depth analysis of the overall production costs for paper and ink vs electronic. Tree to processing to ticket vs smartphone, grid, network, software, and so on. I imagine the paper process is exceptionally cheaper but I could very well be wrong.
Paper is fine for the environment. Paper takes an absolutely tiny portion of a tree (and burning the pulp waste tends to result in a net energy surplus from the pulp mill!), whereas the amount of energy to create one computer (even a phone) is massive.
> I doubt I’d ever need a car in Germany given the rail system was much more convenient
Sure, if you live in a larger city and you never leave… I lived in Munich for years and never needed a car, just comfortable shoes, a bike and occasionally a transport ticket.
Try to get to a smaller town or village, you are lucky if you only spend twice as much time getting there as with a car.
The trains get randomly cancelled, delay is basically guaranteed, the workers go on strikes relatively frequently, so you can never rely on trains working for anything remotely important.
> You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Pro tip: some websites offer to start the subscription later in the month and you only pay for those days. So if, for example, you were to attend a certain hacker conference in Hamburg at the end of December, you could buy the ticket for the last 5 days of the month for 49/31*5 euro. Just have to cancel before 10th of December so that it doesn't renew. ("HVV Switch" App)
As a UK citizen living in Berlin, I assure you that for all the cancellations and repair works, there's many places which look up to the German system.
(I've also been to the USA, and (IMO) Amtrak makes the UK look good).
I recently needed two tickets from NYC to LA, and was astonished to find air tickets for $80 and rail tickets for $2200. It's so unbelievably expensive (not counting that the flight was a few hours and the train was 56 hours).
> If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Just in case this is helpful to someone, you can buy the ticket from one of those different transport organizations you mentioned and avoid that time limit to cancel. The one to use for that is https://www.mopla.solutions/, it's a simple app (alternatively web site) that worked really well for me (no affiliation).
It started with 9€, is 49€ now, and will be 58€ starting 2025.
You can buy for a single month when booking through the right company. "mo.pal" is a good one, for example. However, I agree that it is a bit predatory.
> Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
The €9 ticket was a 3 month temporary offer, which was not originally intended to continue permanently at all.
> I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
The ticket is subsidised by the German government(beyond the amount that all rail infrastructure and most services are subsidised) for the purpose what is covered in the article - encouraging permanent modal shift of regular travellers(primarily commuters) from road to rail. If you're a tourist, it's not meant for you. Sorry.
Airtravel is also subsidised by the German tax payer. Much more than the 49 EUR ticket. No matter if you are a tourist or not. (Arguably mostly for tourists actually.)
Commercial aviation fuel is tax exempt in the EU, I would already count that as a subsidy (yes, I count not taxing something that's normally taxed as a subsidy, even if it isn't done by directly paying out money).
> If you're a tourist, it's not meant for you. Sorry.
Tourist&foreigners can use the Deutschlandticket, too.
But: it's a monthly subscription automatically renewing every month, so one has to cancel it early enough when planning to leave the country. You'll also typically need a smartphone for the ticket.
Well, on mobile they make you think you need the app, but it's region locked. I happened to email them about how this is annoying for tourists yesterday and got a very German response,
"Downloading the Deutschlandticket.de app from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store is only possible in certain countries." (ikr, it's THE problem)
What? How? I have the ticket and despite that I never use any regional train because they're generally awful.
(Local busses and trams on the other hand work pretty well)
Not only — when I visit friends in the UK, I've had single rail tickets cost more than the increased next years' cost of a monthly nationwide ticket here in Germany.
Germany is smaller than California. The United States is very, very large place, mostly unpopulated. It’s hard to apply whatever Germany, a small, densely populated country does to the US, which is largely empty land.
Why do we have to pretend that routes between Montana and South Dakota have to come up when discussing ways of improving rail usage in the US? We could treat routes between Chicago, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis like Germany. We could treat high speed rail in California or the Northeast like Japan. Choosing to live in an extremely rural area shouldn't just be a "well it doesn't help" me trump card to defeat things that will help most of the population.
Exactly. Always somebody trots out invalid arguments about size and population density. There are smaller states in the USA that are about as dense as Germany, like Maryland and Connecticut. So, why don't those states have great state-wide public transit systems?
We also have a similarly frustrating kind of arguments in germany itself.
Like, focus on public transport won't work. Because in some tiny towns of 30k people living there, there is never a bus around so why care? Like... dude. In Hamburg, we have subway stations that move more people in minutes than people live in your town. Yes, it may not work on your case. Your case is however a side note. It needs consideration, but not focus.
Or electric vehicles. There are interesting questions about electric vehicles in uncontrolled situations, emergency services and long-distance situations. As well as regions without a good charging infrastructure. Yes. These are problematic. Except, most likely, more unique cars drive past my window in an hour on a workday than exist in that tiny town. Just keep your ICE car for the trip to spain you never take by car, but we should optimize the vehicles in cities. Again, it needs consideration, but not focus.
Yep, federal income tax is a big reason. For states to fund this on their own requires additional taxation. Some places like FL don’t even have a state income tax, so they are stuck trying to get tourists to fund transportation projects somehow or increasing sales taxes or higher tolls. And of course higher tolls have the unfortunate side effect of reducing demand for the thing to begin with.
This is a boring trope. Whether it’s a group of United States or a single State is a debate as old as the country. You’re going to need really compelling reasons for states to give up their representation and participate in the state vote required to amend the constitution to remove their rights.
You talk about states as if they are people. But they are not. States are a fiction invented by people (and let's be honest, by rich and powerful people), and so they can be torn down by people (likely not the rich and powerful).
"State representation" and "states' rights" are not compelling to most people, other than via some vague appeal to "isn't it great that New Mexico can do one thing and Maine can do something else?", which by itself does not require "state representation" or the current ideas of "states' rights".
It was a valid debate back when travelling to the capitol took months by horse. Nowadays everyone uses services from other states on a daily basis, and possibly work in another state (with WFH) on a daily basis. It's pretty darn clear that the USA simply could not exist as a bunch of separate states anymore.
And frankly, states are already giving up their representation in the current system. If you're not a swing state, you're irrelevant. If you live in a populated state, you have a second-class vote.
If the USA had a modern voting system and anyone proposed the current pile of junk, they would be laughed out of the room.
Because those states are part of the same federal government and they have a say in what the federal government does. These rail systems almost always require federal government level investments.
Another significant issue is that the USA wasn’t built for rail, and to do so now requires sign off by land owners, municipalities, and so on. The amount NIMBY-oriented policies in California, for example, is a serious impediment. Oddly, people cite rural areas as an issue, but rural areas aren’t typically an issue. It would be comparably inexpensive to run high speed rail over undeveloped land, while tearing up buildings, roads, water, sewer, and power would be tremendously costly. For much of Europe, rail transport was put in place long before automobiles became commonplace. For much of the USA, the cities didn’t even exist at that time, and they were mostly built around automobiles.
And how many people regularly commute across the United States? The absolute majority of the journeys people make regularly is still quite short, so why not start by optimizing for them? Then continue with building high speed intercity connections between the urban areas with <500 km distance to create valuable alternatives to being stuck in the highway traffic and dealing with the airport security nonsense.
Why do you always think that you need to reinvent a tried and true solutions that have been proven to work across the world?
Also even if you're worried about going cross-country, that requires what, two fast lines between the coasts to get good routes? So even though those areas don't have many people per square mile, passing through would need an extremely small amount of track per square mile.
1. CA is the 3rd largest state in the USA. Do any of the 47 smaller states have something like this?
2. As the unpopulated bits necessarily don't have many people or things to do in them, the cost of subsidising a public transit ticket in those places is necessarily small.
The EU is only about half the land area of the USA; Germany is roughly equivalent of the fourth largest US state, Montana, and only CA, TX, and AK are bigger.
There’s a happy medium somewhere though and the US doesn’t meet it at all. I can’t even take a bus from my neighborhood in a California city to the grocery store in a timely manner and it’s often cancelled
Oh, I know - I live in Oakland. I think even here the population density is lower than in European cities. (It's definitely lower than in Asian mega-cities.)
But yes, I do wish California did better. People are used to bad transit, and have never visited Tokyo or even NYC, so expectations are low.
The size "excuse" is often brought up, I don't think that's valid though, e.g. Sweden with a significantly lower density has much better public transport. Or if we talk absolute size I think even Russia has a better rail transport system than the US for example. Like usual I think it can largely be attributed politics and to the strength of the car lobby in the US (as well as a weird desire to "stick it to poor people"), which caused a complete focus on individual travel.
I don't have the details, but every single time I have heard the mention of Deutsche Bahn in the last few years it has been accompanied by comments of how broken it has become, with constant delays and cancellations, to the point where for many people it is no longer a viable option for commute or for anything where you cannot risk to be up to several hours late.
I guess it's all relative. If you come to rely on an excellent and omnipresent rail service for many years as a society, the impacts are quite big when it stops working well. If the service itself is built assuming reliability, where transferring between trains is common, then issues can get substantially amplified if that choreography gets somewhat disrupted.
There is a big reporting bias though. You won't see in the news "of the 40,000 railway connections today, most were on time". You only read about some train having had an AC issue or the like.
I have family in Germany and they never go by train but tell me regularly about how bad the train has become. They have literally not been in one for 15+ years. But they watch the news every day.
among intercity trains run by Deutsche Bahn, the on-time rate hovers around 2/3. it's technically true that "most were on time", but one third being late is really terrible, especially since you often need to make a tight connection.
even if your family has no justifiable basis for believing what they do about DB, they happen to be correct by luck.
Long-distance trains are worse statistically because they travel longer Router and therefore have more opportubities to gain delay. Across all trains, puncuality is like 95%.
>There is a big reporting bias though. You won't see in the news "of the 40,000 railway connections today, most were on time". You only read about some train having had an AC issue or the like.
I feel most know about Japan's shinkansen being run well.
For those who don't, the average delay is 1.1 minutes on average.
For comparison, the DB long distance trains are considered on time if they're less than 6 minutes late, and still only 64% are considered on time.
They have dedicated tracks. In Germany all train lines (freight, local trains, long-distance trains) share the same tracks and especially at different speeds this causes delays and problems.
Building new track or even adding more lanes is extremly difficult because of NIMBY's and from 1995 to 2005 switches and extra lanes for overtaking where build back to save costs.
Additionally signalling is in large parts still very labour intensive and smaller tracks are often still running with technology from the early 20th century and late 19th century.
So the problem Deutsche Bahn has to solve is quite a bit harder than shinkansen.
Long distance trains are getting more unreliable (ICE, IC) due to repair works on the tracks - regional / local trains are mostly fine (at least in my place here) and I can't remember the last time there was an delay longer than 10 minutes here. However lately I've saw that trains are cancelled due to manpower shortages and due to the nature the local trains are organized (there is a tender and a railway company wins that tender for 5 years with the same rolling stock) peaks in capacity like on the weekend are not dealt with.
It was broken long before the offer though so the reduction in driving being moderate probably reflects fewer shifts in daily commute and mostly more leisure usage.
Remember that it cost a small rent to get this subscription until the 9€ experiment. Flat fee national transport, I don't remember the exact price but it's multiple hundreds a month in both the Netherlands (NS altijd/trein vrij) and Germany (Bahnkarte 100). Even my local subscription to go ~10km between two cities in Germany (NRW) cost 90€ a month until that experiment
A nationwide subscription for 60 euros is a steal, even when the long distance trains are excluded
Doesn't Germany have an extremely large social safety net?
Who are these poor people that don't have 49€ for a month of transportation, and how are they possibly surviving without that much money - given the cost of everything else in Germany?
Well you'll usally have 563€/month as a single or 506€/month if living with a partner. State pays health insurance and rent (up to a certain limit in size of the flat). In most cities it's further subsidized (25-29€ for the 49€ ticket).
If that's enough depends a lot where you live, if you have family or not and your livestyle.
You have to pay your energy bills (40-70€/month) and internet / cell-phone (40-50€/month) for yourself.
If you are a healthy single it's perfectly fine if you life a simple life. But you can't really put aside any savings.
Someone said in other comment that that 9 ticket was one time only
> That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket
For a developed country, 59 EUR is not all that expensive if it helps you get to a job. Having it be too cheap would probably degrade the quality of service for busier routes and make it harder for future projects to pay themselves off.
Hundreds of thousands of people use public transit daily in America. Long headways, poor coverage, and lackluster maintenance budgets are a much more important problem than what you're describing.
I wish public transit served homeless people as well as a lot of folks like to imagine it does.
A lot of homeless aren't "transients." They aren't just passing through.
If we had excellent public transit to make it easier for homeless people to travel at will, maybe they would be. And maybe their lives would be overall better and they would get less open hatred for being poor and unhoused in a world making it increasingly challenging to get housing for far too many people.
I was in San Francisco recently, and, okay, maybe San Francisco is special or something, but the public transport seemed basically fine? Insofar as it existed; coverage wasn’t great, but it didn’t seem particularly threatening where it existed.
BART is different than most systems. Generally people are talking about buses in my experience. Most trains/subways are relatively tame compared to buses. I was carless for a couple of years in college and had to live off campus to afford rent and riding the bus I encountered more than a few times that made me nervous.
>That's a lie told by people who sell fear as a product to people who always want new reasons to live in fear.
They don't just sell fear. They sell confirmation bias too.
The man who lives in an ivory tower in the suburbs is happy to read the news about a stabbing on the subway as it makes him feel less bad for not putting his money where his mouth is and riding it himself.
I used to live in Toronto in 2019 to 2020 and used the transit exclusively.
I return as a visitor of Toronto every quarter for work and there are many times where I Uber instead of TTC because of these comments. Even slightly busy at 4-5 PM there's always folks who have hit the gym and skipped showering and most days there's "something" happening on the TTC.
Remember folks, if someone says they don't want to ride transit with a hobo smoking meth, they're lying and they're a bad person. Even if they've previously experienced it firsthand.
I spent years riding public transit in Portland, NYC, Seattle, SF, San Diego, Chicago, and other US cities. I can tell you anecdotally that public transit in the US is dangerous and meant for the poors who don’t have their shit together to level up and commute via car.
Ride 8AM and 5PM every workday for a year and tell me that it’s safe when you roll through the bad parts of Long Island/ brooklyn/Queens or the south side of Chicago. Tell me that you don’t have to take the inconvenient early train because of nTh handicap ramp pickup or last-mile cyclist that slows down your commute. Security on transit only cares about fare collection. The US is not like Europe where there is some latent pride in your ancestors accomplishments.
European here. Spent a week in NYC with a 9 month old. Traveled all over 4 of the 5 boroughs and never felt in the slightest threatened. The only major issue was the lack of elevators. Fortunately NYC people are really friendly and helped us with the stroller every time.
The main reason is because Americans are unbelievably wealthy and can afford large homes that require multiple cars for the family to get around. It’s a positive sign of American prosperity and the envy of the world hence the massive immigration demand and relative lack of expatriatism.
If America gets to a point where that’s no longer possible and people have to live in smaller and more densely populated areas not by choice but by necessity then the country is truly in decline.
Let the Germans cram themselves into smaller homes and trains. I truly hope Americans can continue to prosper and acquire comfortable homes with more utility and private transport powered by cheap energy for all.
I think this is one reason why it is rarely expanded, people associate the stops as a way for criminals to get around; but I think usage is not great largely because it hasn't expanded...it's a self-feeding cycle.
This is just false. In the US, when public transport is good by the same measures as other countries use, such as frequency, coverage and so on, Americans use public transport just fine.
The real reason, rather then looking at the most basic surface level is actually the horrible land use planning and the horrible transportation and city engineering. This includes things like zoning, building regulation, environmental regulation and many other things.
The real puzzle imho is to get people to use public transport for the mostly empty route and time combinations. There are many of those for different reasons.
Trains are so heavy it doesnt really cost or save anything if there are people inside or not.
Except this only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs, across the country there are plenty of places where the car is the only viable option.
Germany is a dense country with a developed rail network, you are never far from a train station.
Bear in mind that this includes also city transportation, which makes it a great deal.
My gripe with the ticket is that traveling with bikes in regional train became a gamble, you never know if you can get in as there is so many people inside already (and even more when the previous train got cancelled, which happens a lot...)
Yeah, but doesn't make the Bahn more punctual, or reduce those comute times from 3h down to the 1h that is possible by car, not having to jump across four connections, with related delays and dropped connections.
The 49 Euro ticket is about local transportation, when you are talking about 3h you are talking about intercity transportation not covered by this ticket.
Intercity travel has lots of punctuality problems but many of the local train operations and S-Bahn are often much superior. At least in places where I have been, like Karlsruhe, Berlin, Hamburg the local transport has been very good.
Not everything in live is about long distance communing.
> 3h down to the 1h
That completely depends on the details of your route and ignores lots of possible aspects. As a universal statement its just outright false.
maybe 3 hours in the car and 1h with public transport.
if you are in the rushhour and a traffic jam (not an unusual problem), then the train will be faster. Plus one can work in the train or relax.
My regional train here 20km going into the city center is impossible to beat by car.
77.77% of the people live in cities. 55% live in cities with >20k people. Generally Germany is a decentralized country with a lot of regions with local center cities. There are 15 cities with >500k people. France has only four.
It really depends on a lot of factors but I generally agree that many people vastly overestimate the time savings of taking a car.
And that's before we get into questions like "How many of your hours of paid work are required to make car payments, insurance payments, tag, title and maintenance?"
What's your definition of 'big train station hubs'? There are plenty of places that have small train station that connect to bigger hubs. The claim that its only useful for people close to 'big hubs' is simply false.
Yes there are places where cars are better in some aspects, but that is the case no matter how the ticket is structured. You can't magically extend the train network by reducing ticket price.
And if cars are the only viable option is questionable, as there are many people even in those places who don't own a car. They just have to live with subpar bus system or other local transport.
As a counter example I live in Rome where city trains are the best public transport available and house prices are heavily linked to closeness to subway or train station, yet we still are the city with most cars per capita in Europe and probably in the whole west.
If only those living close to train stations used trains it would massively reduce the need for cars and consequently the heavy traffic we usually experience.
I live 15 minutes walking from the closest station and it's so much better to go to work by train than by car, the trip is shorter, I don't have to drive, find a parking spot, a legal one, where I can't be fined and don't have to pay for it, while on the train I can read and air conditioning actually works and train cars are usually not crazy full like subway ones.
TL:DR that's how trains work they are not supposed to solve every commuting problem but the solvable ones
It helped anybody and everybody that wanted to travel for any reason. It meant I could go to the nearest big city to catch a movie at an IMAX theatre, something that was significantly more expensive before. You don't need a big train station hub to have trains, and you only need a few trains or buses to make up for the cost and make it worth it. Since, you know, it applies to buses as well. I live in a small shithole town, and it's extremely convenient to have the Deutschlandticket because it means I can take the bus to anywhere in the area, including the nearest train station, and I can take a train to anywhere I want from nearby towns to cities hours away. Even though I own a car again, I still have the ticket because of how useful it is and how much money it saves.
I don't understand how anybody can paint this as a bad thing. Are you also against universal health care by any chance?
Just about all of which used to have train service, right?
I mean, in the US I've been to a lot of small towns where there is no train service, but the old station is still there, with the rails all torn out and replaced with houses, or roads, or bike paths.
And in the UK, the infamous Beeching cuts in the 1960s removed lines based on a profitability model which wasn't applied to roads, causing many communities to lose rail service and essentially require everyone there to shift to cars (replacing trains with bus service failed.)
How much of Germany is like that, where the people in the country insisted on good roads for their cars, causing the rail system to be decommissioned, and now they are stuck with that decades-old decision to prioritize the more environment destroying option?
Most beeching stations were of no use- the service wasn’t there. The village my son’s school is at had a station, a mile out the middle, with 5 trains a day. You would have to change to another train to get to a station with a regular service to London, and increasing services wouldn’t be possible without significantly increasing terminal capacity.
Menawhile the far larger village I live in has never had a station.
Some lines would be useful nowadays and could possibly be worthwhile, but there was no realistic way to know which should have been kept in the 60s. Far better would be to stop all the nonsense and just start digging new lines. But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels. Billions the m40 never had to spend.
> But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels
Some political groups will never be happy, I wonder if better strategy is confrontating them then appeasing them. At least would have kept the budget down
People talk a lot of nonsense about 'Beeching cuts' without really understanding the history. 'Beeching' has simply become a political buzzword anybody who knows even a little about rail likes to bandy about.
Lines started closing around the 1930s and after WW2 this continued. Beeching was only working on this topic a short time and produced a report that suggested lots of things. Some of those things were done, others weren't. Cuts happened before Beeching and after him. And they happened during various different railroads organization schemes.
That it was strictly about profitability is also false. If anything it was about cost. They believed in future buses (and yes cars) would take car of those communities. At that time bus services were often government run.
And Beeching was actually correct in many cases. The British rail system was simply not rationally build. It was basically built by partly speculation driven rush. While this is not a bad and certainly gave Britain a great rail system, once you have centralized control it does actually make sense to reevaluate. Lots of lines didn't make rational sense to continue.
Now of course I agree that to many lines were closed that shouldn't have been closed. But that is only a small part of the issue with the rail system. Britain still has a pretty high rail density.
Well, of course, if we didn't have traffic ministers again and again, who do everything they can to make rail less attractive and road more attractive, then we could probably have a great system. But automobile lobby is so strong, they buy all the politicians in that role, probably even before they land in that role, so I guess normal people will have to keep suffering, so that those politicians can have a life of luxury. Thank you.
I have to admit the ‘all access’ ticket system was pretty awesome when I visited. Note that this did not include trains going into Austria (even if you road them only in Germany). Nearly every city is joined by rail and it’s incredible.
Sadly in the US Midwest we just don’t have there population density to do this sort of thing.
This last week we would've probably all seen the photos of the gridlock on I-75 as Tampa Bay residents fled Hurricane Milton. If you followed the story you know it eventually became almost impossible to evacuate.
We should also know how much more efficient buses are on roads at moving people than individual cars are. You can fit ~60 people on a bus that takes up the space of ~2 cars.
What should happen in these emergencies is there should be dedicated bus lanes and dedicates buses to evacuate people.
But beyond that, what we should learn from this is that lack of public transit (intracity and intercity) is a public safety issue. Cars simply aren't an efficient use of resources.
You can see from the comments here people will talk about "subsidies" for rail. Why does rail need to turn a profit? Roads don't. The Post Office doesn't. The Fire Department doesn't. Yet for some reason we hold public transport infrastructure to a higher standard.
Americans, in particular, love their cars. And there has been a powerful lobbying operation to associate rail with tax increases. This is so short-sighted because nobody is confiscating your car. Fewer people on the roads will improve your driving experience and travel times.
We see in the UK that it's cheaper to fly to Spain than to take intercity train journeys. As far as I'm concerned, citywide rail (eg the Tube in London, the NYC Subway) should be free and intercity rail should have a nominal cost that is cheaper than driving.
Would be interesting to see if the subsidy is covered by additional economic activity to cover the shortfall. If not it won’t last long, money doesn’t grow on trees
Military spending is a bit of an odd one. It's basically expensive by design and ideally doesn't have any real effect.
It's not far off from a proof-of-work system. Especially given how there are many cheaper options to get rid of an enemy, but those have been outlawed such that the only options remaining are costly in people, money and goods.
I really really would like to see Labour in the UK to use their sizeable majority + Parliamentary sovereignty to upgrade the UK’s infrastructure, including more train subsidies, but they seem very cautious and also terrified of raising taxes. Such a waste that the UK is one of the few places where Parliament could just ram shit through and yet building anything in the UK is so hampered by self-imposed red tape.
> through massive new housing akin to the newtowns of 50 years ago
New towns will just be full of commuters and have no life in them. We need to build high rises in cities, and give people living in apartments real rights - the leasehold system is feudalism.
And give Manchester and Birmingham real metro/tube systems!
HS2 was an ongoing project, it was threw. It was simply cancled by a fucking asshat person who tried to appeal to the far right in a series of stunts to save his sorry ass.
New housing has to be built along transportation corridors. If you want to efficiently build housing, you have to extend transportation infrastructure into areas and then grow towns around that.
This isn't actually hard and has been done for 100 years but somehow in modern day many countries are to stupid to understand this.
Lots of people seem surprised that the new government apparently have no desire to improve the dire state of the UK. But that was never on the cards and the idea that they might have done so is pure projection. The current leadership of the Labour party are from the right-wing Labour First faction who have always been very clear that their aims are not to improve the country but to keep the left out of power. They will govern in the same business-as-usual nothing-can-ever-get-better vein as the Tories and their Blairite predecessors.
However I don't blame the public for not knowing this fact. There was (and to some extent still is) a media lockdown on reporting who is behind the Starmer project. (Because if it had been reported on it might not have succeeded).
It's not a question of moral standing or identity but rather that public transport (and vegan) advocates would like to force you to live like they do. Those things gaining too much popularity threatens the way you do things.
We have examples of this happening, eg smoking. It has become unpopular enough that governments pass nonsensical bans like banning flavored cigarettes or just making it entirely illegal for only a certain year cohort (literal age discrimination).
> public transport (and vegan) advocates would like to force you to live like they do
Is there a citation for this claim?
> governments pass nonsensical bans like banning flavored cigarettes
Is it nonsensical? There is research[1][2] showing that flavoured tobacco is one of the primary factors used to attract younger users. We know that tobacco is bad, and also that flavoured tobacco increases its usage, so unless you are against public health policy measures themselves, it follows logically that flavoured tobacco should be covered by public health measures.
When public health measures turn into "hello, we're now making your life worse" then yes, I am against them.
Imagine you drink coffee your whole life. You rely on it. Now your government comes in and goes "coffee is now illegal, you're welcome!!!"
It changes your life against your wishes and you can't do anything about it. The only action that realistically works is preemptive - don't let coffee become disliked enough to enact such a ban. That's why people argue against it. Principles such as "people should be free to make their own choices" aren't values our society cares about. (Important to remember: it's popular to hate on things everyone else hates on, so you gotta keep it under a critical mass.)
>Is there a citation for this claim?
Asking for a citation doesn't make sense. You know damn well there isn't one. Nobody is going to credibly announce that their goal is to ban something popular, because that would make it harder for them to force that change on you. It's done piece by piece. Maybe the people that start it don't even want a ban, but it eventually escalates.
But logical reasoning can explains it too: people support public transport for climate reasons. Why would they not want you to make 'the right choice' like them?
Vegans? Veg[a..z1..9A..Z]ns? Are there any vegyns out there who object to being put on the meat/no-meat spectrum? Are you afraid HN will censure you if you spell out the complete word?
Oh aha thanks for pointing that out. Now that you mention it that does seem obvious. I definitely didn't catch that from the first use though. There should be a better word to capture both those meanings that doesn't confuse my poor regex sensibilities like that. :|
I didn't get that either; not that obvious after all! I thought they were making a joke about vegan being a swear/taboo word, given the context of saying people don't want to hear of it because it allegedly threatens their morality
It takes forever compared to driving in most cases, catching the transit often involves a walk, and a lot of public transit is kind of grungy. This doesn't apply or matter as much in some cases (e.g. the NY subway) but in general it's not great, at least not in the USA.
Does transit not always involve a walk, even a small one? It's not like everyone lives next to a subway station, and most destinations aren't right next to a subway station either.
Personally I'm not opposed to public transport, in fact I want to like the railway. I tried.
But the German railway is in such a poor state that I never use it.
Not for small trips (with regional trains that are covered by my 49€ ticket) and especially not for longer trips (long distance trains like ICEs).
Every time you enter an ICE just remember that its a coinflip on whether or not you'll arrive on time to get your connecting train. Or maybe you won't arrive at all, happened enough times to me that I frankly don't trust it anymore.
And considering how expensive ICE tickets have gotten... yeah I'd rather take the highway, despite that I don't like driving much.
I don't know where you drive for long car trips, but going south from e.g. Hamburg on the A1, or through the Ruhrgebiet by car is a much bigger coin flip with respect to arrival times (while always being significantly slower even on good days). So why the complains about punctionality for trains, but somehow it's fine for car travel?
Because missing important appointment (Termin) that you have arranged 3 fucking months before by waiting in a phone queue for 30 minutes because your Sbahn was cancelled because of a nonsense signal-related reason is so much better.
Only 62,7% of the trains were in time (and by in time they use a rigged system to count what is in time and what is not). So it's basically a 50% chance if you will be delayed at your destination or in time. Also note, that if you have to change trains mid travel you have that chance again. That means you will be late very very often. If you travel as an individual and you don't value your time at all this is a great deal, if you travel for business purposes good luck to you.
Apart from that, it's a lot more stressful (and time consuming) to go to a train station and leave at a train station instead of just driving by car.
Punctuality of local trains is much higher than the long distance ones whose stats you’re quoting here. For rapid transit, punctuality is less of an issue, compared to frequency.
Am i a communist when i prefer a government to operate and provide basic services like the public transport system, the postal system, the telecommunication/internet service or prisons either paid by taxes or by fees, that don't generate profit beyond paying the costs, instead of using taxes to rescue bankrupt banks and companies?
Even if you were, is that really a bad thing? Why do we demonize communism (and socialism ) so much ?
Poor implementation in Soviet Union or in PRC that is only seen through the color of propaganda with the inherent cultural and ideological biases is hardly a good basis for judging a movement that was a response to centuries of extreme worker exploitation in direct result industrialization and raise of machines.
Are there really bad ideas in socialism ? yes of course, there are bad ideas in late stage capitalism or in any free market system or any system.
We learn and try to take to best from all economic systems not demonize any of them.
Look who is putting out this propaganda and who is funding them and then you will understand why they MUST sell this ticket as a success…
With the high amount of tax money Germany collects from their slaves (almost 50%) we should have mobile phone coverage everywhere. Truth is there is no network on most high traffic railway tracks. You can’t have a phone call without interruption of signal loss when traveling with Deutsche Bahn. They also have no WiFi on the trains, toilets are broken and rarely anything is on time. They wanted to become more reliable but they postponed this goal to 2070!!!
Which I as a German simply fail to fathom. The quality of our Deutsche Bahn is so bad I would never drive by train. The worst thing is that they are incapable to have their trains be on time. Whenever you travel there is an extremely high chance you will not arrive at your destination in time.
Not every trip is time sensitive, most trains do run on time, and not all trains are operated by your nemesis. If you still refuse to "ever" take a train anywhere, that's on you rather than the system
Because it is a regional problem and some areas work mostly fine. I also fail to fanthom why people drive in rush hour, queuing every day for hours. Yet people do that. And people love to complain, especially those that only take trains on public holidays. But hey, here in Sweden the trains are worse than in Germany, but people complain far less and trains are full anyways.
Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry. If we accept that it reduces carbon emissions by 6.7 million tonnes per year, then that works out to €447 per tonne. That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.
I do recognise that modal shift towards rail may have other positive externalities, but I don't know how to price any of them.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/ghg-abatement...
Focusing on the cost-per-tonne for carbon reduction misses the broader value of railways. They're not just about reducing emission! They facilitate daily commutes, expand job opportunities, and help drive the economy. It’s a subsidy for businesses too.
Gp said they know about these other factors but doesn't know how to price them. Do you know a way?
"These things aren't important unless you can wedge them into my spreadsheet" is the time of consultant-brained nonsense that got us the world we're living in.
I believe that this idiotic short-sighted minmaxing (mainly due to the conservative party) has led to many of Germany's current infrastructure issues. Laying fiber? VDSL is cheap and has been good enough so far. Renewable energies? Importing Russian gas halves CO2 emissions compared to coal and is way cheaper (surely Russia would never think of abusing the dependence). Maintaining the railway network? That would cost money, and it wasn't broken yet.
Nobody said that. But if you're gonna spend the public money, you need some way of determining "how much are we willing to pay for this good thing".
We spend public money on things that are almost impossible to put a concrete value on all the time. Parks. NASA. University subsidies. Animal welfare. The list goes on. "How much are we willing to pay" is entirely subjective and can't be produced by a nice clean spreadsheet.
If you could make a park for 5 million dollars, or the same park for 3 million, you would do the latter, would you not? Then you'd have 2 million left to do something else with.
Because that is the comparison being drawn here. A valid objection would be that there are other axes that are material but are not being considered when we reduce the question to dollars per ton of CO2 -- but arguing that we ought not even try to put a value on how we spend public money will not be a reasonable stance until public money is infinite.
Who's "we"? The public is mostly not made up of consultants and do not appreciate consultant logic being applied to everything. People would prefer to define values and then act on those values.
So you would be good with spending more money and even increasing total carbon footprint, if it just felt good?
Seriously, if you're not going to measure anything or use logic, I'm not sure how you can even call them "defined" or "values". It sounds like, "I saw it on TV/internet/billboard so it must be true".
Yes, because that is exactly how American cities are currently built today -- expensive carbon-intensive roads paved out to sprawling suburbs, the independent financial upkeep of which is not sustainable long-term. [0]
The costs for car-based infrastructure are also sky high: $1+ million per mile of new road, excluding constant maintenance in repavings, potholes, and drainage systems. [1]
From an economic lens, transportation infrastructure is a net gain to the economy. To me, there is no reason why public transit subsidies should be scrutinized on financials above and beyond how public roads are scrutinized.
If we recognize roads are useful, then public transit should be an even more efficient use of taxpayer dollars on mobility per infrastructure footprint costs alone -- even before carbon reductions are considered at all.
---
[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/5/12/6-principles-f...
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-...
I didn't say that. The OP argued "Actually this is bad because the cost per ton of carbon saved is higher than some other way to save carbon."
The original replyer pointed out that "ways to save carbon" are not necessarily fungible and there are other benefits to subsidized rail travel. The followon dismissal was to throw back and come up with a way to "price" those other benefits.
What I am objecting to is the entire chain of thinking that starts with trying to do simplistic, reductionist price comparisons and then refusing to consider other factors that don't fit in the pricing exercise.
Doesn't having a car do this too?
No. This is something Texas is having to come to terms with right now. Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better.
So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to cities on either ends of the line while still being a relatively accessible commute for anyone in between the cities.
And of course as great as that is, the rail line will be able to relatively trivially scale capacity by adding more trains to the same line at a rate far above massively expensive road expansion projects that cost comparable to the entire planned rail line.
So if you want to grow past a certain density you do have to start switching to rail and higher density does mean more business opportunities and generally greater options for prosperity for the populations in the area.
Is Texas "coming to terms" with it, though? Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be. If your goal is to have everyone work in downtown Dallas then yes, they suck. But you can just build offices and manufacturing facilities all around the state instead, avoiding the creation of single bottlenecks.
Then you've instead created sprawl which has huge ongoing costs in terms of resource and energy use, as well as disconnecting people and communities.
Good comment except for the first word. Obviously cars enable all sorts of movement and economic activity, so why not just admit it? The rest of your comment is just talking about how rail may do all those things to a greater extent than cars. You don’t need to deny benefits of cars, it doesn’t bolster your arguments. Better to just be honest and then extol the virtues of rail and other transportation methods.
Of course a car does, but does that mean you should ignore all the benefits brought by bicycles? And if we go that far, should we overlook our own muscular locomotion? It all enables the same mobility after all.
Having a car also entails massive subsidies; when taking that into account the all-in costs per unit traveled are basically always cheaper with rail.
Source?
False
Anecdotally, I frequently take day (or weekend) trips to other European cities by rail. It is usually quicker than the roads but also crucially you can be productive on the train. If I had to drive my car there then I probably wouldn't bother.
This reminds me of this Swedish office on a train https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HbrI3refig , made for a company which had an hour train commute from Stockholm. It's even got 8 telephone line (4 in and 4 out)!
I guess a lot of people would use work booths/conference rooms on trains, but the price/profit has to work for both sides (the train company and users). As for trains, the old-fashioned 6 seater compartments offer more privacy for groups.
This is an aside, but I’d never seen that “Beyond 2000” show before.
Retro future is a favorite topic of mine, so thanks for sharing.
Yeeesh though, re: part 2 of that episode, it’s wild to watch people in 1988 articulate the looming threat of global warming, and to hear them say on this 25 year old program “we’ve known about this for 30 years”
you could also work from a car if someone else is driving it like a taxi, but imagine the price difference to travel such a long distance every day over rail versus metro + rail.
Another point I haven't seen mentioned much is safety. Rail is vastly safer than cars and results in less strain on the medical system.
Europe is not exactly the standard bearer for productivity though, is it? If one wants to advance an argument for emulating European style passenger rail, this is really not the right argument.
A car is more expensive, and clogs the roads, which causes other costs to the economy and penalizes commutes.
Trains scale better than cars in dense areas and offer more than just emissions reductions. Good rail infrastructure is a big part of makes a large city world-class and improves everyday lives. Subsidizing trains is better than a lot of other uses of government funds.
Cars destroy walkability, cyclability, ability for kids to freely play outside, enable sprawl (hence more energy consumption hence more carbon emissions).
There’s no free lunch with using more surface area, which cars greatly expand people’s ability to consume.
True to a degree but cars also make parenting easier: you get bigger houses, bigger backyards, don't have lug your kids around on public transit, deal with the weather, don't need to worry about rail worker strikes, etc.
All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Do bigger houses make parenting easier, do bigger backyards? I’m inclined towards a large communual yard (a park, if you will) being many times more efficient at keeping them busy, especially if you have a single child.
Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not. They’ll be exposed to a variety of people and situations they’d otherwise never experience.
Similar thing for the weather. I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that any kind of weather limits their options if a car is not available.
I realize my opinions might be different if I were living in a US city, just wanted to give a different perspective.
The other great thing about public transport is you don't have to "lug" / "chauffer" them at all after about 8 or so (what age makes sense depends on area and the kid of course). They can exercise some independence.
Maybe that's true in small, peaceful countries like Denmark, but in the US children "excersising some independence" would likely be kidnapped, raped or killed.
Are you sure that's true? How do you know?
How much does it depend on where in the US you are?
This has never been significantly true, and becomes less true every year.
The probability that any given child will be kidnapped or otherwise threatened by a stranger is minuscule compared to the chance that they will be abused, kidnapped, or killed by a family member.
>All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Laws and sidewalk curbs don’t stop a giant SUV/pickup truck driven by someone looking at their mobile at 40mph in a residential area.
And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down. Those arterial roads basically box in your kids’ roaming area.
That's a goalpost moved from my response.
The poster you responded to wrote:
> They're not just about reducing emission!
Cars increasing emissions seems to be a relevant disqualifier.
How much of the increased rail use is helping increase GDP, though, rather than being purely leisurely trips with little long term value for the economy? More people going to hike in the forest on the weekend technically increases GDP but doesn't add much value to the economy overall.
Keep in mind there’s only about 50 miles of high-speed rail in the U.S. so far. With major cities like Dallas and Houston or San Francisco and LA still unconnected by fast rail, there's significant room to boost GDP and improve lives. Expanding rail isn't just about GDP growth, it's about enhancing daily living and connecting communities more effectively. As RFK famously noted, GDP measures everything ‘except that which makes life worthwhile’. Rail development does both, supporting the economy and enriching our lives.
If I could take a train instead of a plane, I would. Doubly so if it saved me money. Savings for individuals means more money to spend on other things.
I find the word subsidy to be a possible weasel word here. I don't know all the details but a railway system has certain costs (fuel, personnel, water, upkeep, the trains themselves and so on) and takes in a certain amount of revenue (fares and subsidies, also food etc). It might be true that the government increased the subsidy in order to support the cheaper tickets. But that's not the same as "requires". Perhaps I'm splitting hairs but there's a strong danger of comparing apples and oranges if these things aren't spelled out imo.
Don’t forget too that the cost of proving roads is also ‘subsidised’ in most countries, but we’re tend to be a bit blind to that.
(This is not an argument against rail - I just find that subsidies are often mentioned with respect to rail but not with roads).
People don't think of it as a subsidy because they are not charged per use a la toll road.
People also pay fuel tax, registration tax, and other taxes that fund the roads
I think the point is that if they had to do those things every time they used a road it would be more obvious (like buying a train ticket).
In the United States, often a large amount of road funding comes from property tax, so it has nothing to do with operating a car.
I don't really follow that, a toll is a way for it not to be (or to be less) subsidised?
I remember Brad deLong did back of the napkin analysis to determine how much a bart fare should be including the cost of freeways. It was minus $2.00 or something.
Calculating the subsidy associated with state maintenance of roads for private vehicles is difficult.
Some basic level of signage and hazard prevention (potholes, ice etc) is necessary for emergency vehicles and other government operations.
Thereafter, although there is some maintenance cost associated with the road wear from private vehicles and the additional infrastructure required for higher traffic volumes, we don’t have an easy way to calculate the cost.
Wouldn't the very patterns of development be different (and more amenable to rail) if the state didn't spend oodles of money building nice roads to make sprawl livable?
At a high level, urbanisation rates increased through the road building binge of the 20th century.
Perhaps those new migrants to cities would’ve chosen to stay in the countryside without roads? Worsening the economics of rail.
Or maybe they’d use their collective voting power to get more rail friendly new towns built?
I don’t think the answer is obvious.
Sprawl happens when there is available undeveloped land. Roads are just a symptom.
People build outwards first and then upwards.
There is plenty of undeveloped land that people don't move to because there are no roads to get to.
We have more than a century of data showing that roads are subject to induced demand. If you build more roads, people move and sprawl (and take more trips in general) until traffic is once again unbearably bad.
If you build more lanes, more people move further out. Roads create sprawl.
And active urban planning avoids sprawl.
Also bridges and tunnels, which seem to be very expensive to maintain.
I’m not sure if it’s the case here with Germany, but typically we refer to transit spending like this as “subsidies” but for some reason we forget that building and maintaining roads and highways and such are subsidies too.
In the case of the US and probably everywhere else, the highway subsidies are a little insidious too because not only do you pay a boatload of money for highway expansion you have to then go and buy an expensive car and fuel too.
>not only do you pay a boatload of money for highway expansion you have to then go and buy an expensive car and fuel too.
the federal excise tax on fuel pays for (at least in part) the "boatload of money for highway expansion "
Not much. A lot more comes from state funding, which can be anything from property tax to sales tax to additional fuel taxes. Because you pay about the same fuel tax per mile on a 60 mph road as a 25 mph road (but the 60mph road costs 100x as much), you also find driving on slow roads becomes a subsidy to building fast roads.
Here’s another way to think about it: Germany invested N billion into shifting behavior to rail.
How many billions in subsidies has OpenAI gotten to build us a chatbot?
I'm not aware of any subsidies openAi has received. Did I miss something or is this one of the situations we're we are making up new definitions for words?
> I'm not aware of any subsidies openAi has received.
It is rumored that the military (and perhaps three-letter agencies) has/have special contracts with OpenAI. This can definitely be called a subsidy.
A contract isn't a subsidy... A subsidy would be giving them dollars without any particular strings attached except perhaps to use those funds to develop the product. If the contract is to provide money in exchange for services, that's called a transaction.
It’s important to distinguish between an operational cost and capital investment here.
If rail usage continues once the spending stops then it’s an investment. Otherwise is an operating subsidy.
You mean another example of apples and oranges?
Is software and transportation really a good example?
It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself.
The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized.
It’s important to call these out whenever they are because it means the program is not sustainable on its own and that puts it at risk during austerity, etc.
> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation. Yet rail is expected to not just stand on its own two feet but to yield a profit. Both facilitate commerce and improve a regions productivity (rail inarguably does so with greater efficiency, especially when integrated into a public transport system) - why is rail treated so differently?
> why is rail treated so differently?
Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on.
Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else is a deviation from that which requires extra consideration before it should receive any resources.
On the one hand that's also a lot of jobs and profits, but on the other hand if all this activity is in service of a mode of transport that causes considerable short and long-term damage, and is less efficient for many journeys, then it means we're wasting labor and resources that could be put to better use.
> not sustainable on its own
Or it is something that provides a benefit to society as a whole and therefore deserves to be maintained by the institution established by society to do such things, government, without assuming economic efficiency is 100% correlated with societal benefit.
> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
More or less all non-toll roads (and a few toll roads too). Which makes "applies" seems a bit pointless.
Ths US military is not sustainable on its own...
Or maybe, governments have programs that are funded by all to benefit all, because they are onlt beneficial when they are society-scale? 1/350,000,000th of the US army won't be very useful to any individual American on its own.
Most of the value created by public transit goes into the land near the stations. Employers want offices near stations and employees want homes near stations.
You can recover as lot more money from taxing the land than from fares.
I read about train infrastructure development that was privately funded and built from the profits from land speculation near the new stations.
>The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
I'm German and I can tell you it really does not. Like in a lot of countries car infrastructure is treated like the state of nature, it's just somehow there, and the infrastructure burden of parking, road construction and what have you isn't a topic. It's the 'default culture' and the support it gets is just the status quo, when you try to internalize the cost you cause a shitstorm. Look at how well surge pricing or road toll debates go over in most places, or how sensitive people are to fuel prices.
Rail transport be it commercial or individual despite the fact that it's so much cheaper (in particular on emissions as well) is always one political decision away from being privatized or culled.
The far-right Berlin government is currently doing its darnedest to build the most expensive highway in all of Germany, that nobody actually wants, through a cultural area. Probably because their friend owns the highway construction company.
I don't see how any government, regardless of location, that spends large sums of taxpayer money on a construction project could ever be considered to be "right wing" in any way, let alone "far-right".
Such behaviour fundamentally contradicts even the mildest of right-of-centre ideologies.
An actual right-of-centre government would never even consider starting such a project.
If a right-of-centre government happened to inherit one that had been started by a previous administration, for example, such a project would be immediately terminated, any assets liquidated, and the proceeds directly returned to the taxpayers.
The only way that such a project would ever exist under a right-of-centre government would be if it were initiated, funded, built, operated, and maintained solely by the private sector, without any government involvement at all.
Practices such as the collection of taxes, raising public debt, and government built/run infrastructure are part of left-of-centre ideologies, and certainly not right-of-centre in any way.
> the program is not sustainable on its own
So arrest, investigation prosecution and imprisonment of anyone who steals from Amazon is a massive subsidy, since Amazon pays no tax.
Yes. The government massively subsidises owning physical property.
Not to mention the money spent on funding food stamps for Amazon’s underpaid employees.
> already substantial subsidies for the rail industry
Though to be fair, there are also substantial subsidies for the whole road network.
Road vehicles are heavily taxed in European countries. I don't have the figures for Germany, but the UK spends £12bn per year on roads, while it collects £25bn in road fuel duty and £7bn in vehicle excise duty.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/298675/united-kingdom-uk...
https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/...
https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/...
Vehicle, gas and similar taxes are about €50bn in Germany. The cost of the road system is about €70bn.
[1] https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/oekonomie/au...
According to a study by the HTW Berlin, Germany collects €50 billion in road taxes and duties, but spends €30 billion on road maintenance and €30 billion on traffic police and road accident victims. Add to this an estimated €10-30 billion in environmental damage due to air and noise pollution.
There are also deaths caused by road accidents and health issues caused by pollution.
Those have real economic impacts which aren’t being reflected in the true cost of cars.
Roads are much more efficient with fewer cars.
A German study from 2021 says road traffic created 70 billion euros costs per year. Of that 45 billion had to be paid from general taxes.
This was phrased poorly if I understand the meaning.
"If there is limited use, roads are more efficient than rail"
That's probably true as roads tend to cost less per mile than rail and you don't have transfer problems.
When heavily utilized the opposite is true: rail is more efficient than roads.
I dont know how things are in germany but in the netherlands a lot more people own cars which slows down traffic.
All over the world they keep rebuilding congestion points only for traffic to increase.
If making public transport cheaper attracts more travelers there will be fewer cars on the road. The money spend on public transport will aso make car travel more efficiënt. Roads will last longer. Fewer upgrades are needed. Cars will last longer. etc
It is hard to picture how many cars it takes to move a train full of people.
> 7.6 percent fewer kilometres travelled by car.
> German cars were recorded to have travelled 582.4 billion kilometers.
That's why motorists should always vote for more public transport, instead of increasing road lanes - road per user is improved if you reduce the number of other cars
By what metric?
The weather would like to have a word with you.
Don't forget to factor in the reduced costs of road maintenance, accidents, non-CO2 pollution, and traffic delays.
It saves the commuters the cost of buying a car, insurance, gas and maintenance. it saves building new roads and lifecycle costs of maintaining a road. Trains allow dense developments with a little bit of walking. Walking is healthy, a bit of exercise saves a ton on healthcare costs. Density makes everything cheaper. Carbon emissions are just a bonus.
What’s the subsidy to road and oil companies right now? Might be nice to just shift it over.
The only carbon capture/sequestration method I’m aware of without significant tradeoffs outside of price is direct air capture, and last I saw, that clocked in at $600-1200/ton (Climeworks). So maybe not such a terrible deal?
Wetlands do a better job of carbon sequestration than trees.
Globally, we've lost 85 percent of our wetlands since the 1700s.
Maybe we should restore them.
The sheer amount of additional benefit means this is a gallingly reductive view of it all.
The subsidy for maintaining car infrastructure is causing _more_ co2 per euro invested, how's that fit into these calculations?
This is so useless, it sounds like propaganda.
> requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn
I suspect the key is to find ways to run railways cheaper. It has been a long time since railways were under severe cost competition encouraging people to look for efficiencies.
I think the main one would be to find a way for railways to operate with no staff. Just like a typical road operates most of the time with no staff.
That means you need to redesign everything that currently uses people to not need people. Sure - there would still be occasional maintenance - but nobody always on duty driving trains (automated), nobody selling tickets (online), nobody cleaning stuff (automated cleaning of trains inside and out) etc.
In Japan, rail companies also own the land around the station. There is often a mall or office right on top of the station. So they capture a more of the value of having public transport.
In western countries land lords benefit a lot from nearby public transport for free and maybe only contribute in taxes.
Originally, rail worked kind of like this in the US too. Alternating squares of land adjacent to tracks were ceded to railroads, so you'd have sections of public land and private land beside each other.
I learned about this when someone was trying to make a test case of "corner crossing" from one patch of public land to another a while back.
You see the same thing in Hong Kong - the rail company practically creates new towns when they add a new station or extend a rail line.
I was under the impression Hong Kong was one big urban area already, is there really empty land new towns can be built on?
You can be smack in the middle of Central, and then walk up a path behind the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and be on Old Peak Road hiking up to Victoria Peak. Or be in Wan Chai, take the stairs next to the Rolls Royce car dealer, and be on Bowen Road Fitness Trail and in Aberdeen Park within minutes.
HK island, New Territories, the outer islands and even large parts of Kowloon are predominantly green, parks and forests.
As GP mentioned, occasionally the subway operator MTR will build a new station, build a shopping mall on top, and housing for 50,000 people.
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong#Geography, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_of_Hong_Kong.
Most of the new territories is not highly developed. Kowloon and hk island are both entirely urban.
A Georgist Land Value Tax would fix this!
Opening the railways to competition has utterly ruined the UK's rail network. Ticket price has skyrocketed while service quality has fallen.
In the 30s, French rail companies begged and lobbied the government to nationalize them, so they could exit the burden that was maintaining a rail network.
Rail just isn't profitable, but is vital to society, and will become even more so as gas becomes increasingly expensive/lacking. Some things should just never be opened to competition.
According to GPT, the price per kilometre for rail travel is between €0.23-0.46 in the UK and €0.13-0.20 in Germany. I'm not able to verify those numbers but from my own personal experience I wouldn't doubt it.
Rail in the UK is just so bad that I stopped using it to go to the airport. Everything is constantly delayed or cancelled like I can plan a journey to arrive 2hrs before my flight and the train will randomly pause for 1hr when I'm half way... also the luggage situation is extremely stressful as the racks are out of sight and generally full, like where else am I meant to put my large suitcase after that?
It seems like trains are much larger in Europe with a lot of double deckers.
If there's two of us it's easier and sometimes cheaper to pay £100 for a taxi to the airport door to door (we're fairly rural)
When installed and kept up properly with good policymaking railways are always a positive for the economy. They cause a huge amount of cheap movement that increases business activity. Little towns that become railway stops develop much faster. The bigger stations are great for shops and food. The access to education and high-value driving extracurricular activities increase for younger people too. They overall make the economy resilient against all sorts of crisis (energy, markets)
The more railways are used for commuting, the less people are on the road. So it increases the road efficiency too and reduces degradation. Railways are great drivers of innovation and the technology they generate can be backported to cars, they are initial investment drivers.
However, the first if/when is a big one. You can half ass roads. You pay compensation for a pothole every now and then and make small improvement to get votes. You cannot half ass railways. They require constant maintenance and a whole mindset built around them.
Japan does railways correctly. China is getting there. The Netherlands is nearly a paradise of bike and railways. Germany isn't. The countries with almost the same culture, Austria and Switzerland, care much more about their railways and invest them properly however their government aligns. Germans keep electing the right wing party with their ministers of ~BMW~ transport and then complain about 50% of the non-cancelled trains are late and the maintenance cost of the falling apart rail system is quadrupled.
As someone who's been to both China and Japan I'd say railway is far ahead in China than the rest of the world.
Again, according to GPT, the price per kilometre between them is €0.03-0.06 in China vs €0.15-0.26 in Japan.
I know Japan has a lot of high speed rail coverage but so does China and the difference in price is absolutely insane.
Rail between Beijing and Shanghai for example has an average speed of 300kmh. I believe their high speed network is vaster than Japan's.
> That means you need to redesign everything that currently uses people to not need people
Simplest redesign is running longer trains - they still need just 1 driver.
Britain’s trains are sometimes comically small (3 carriages) and overcrowded. French trains are 2-3x longer, Russia/China even more so.
Second is standardisation - all of Uks train companies run different stock and it’s ovsoleye
At some point the train is longer than the station platform. Then you need to extend the platform, or passengers have to know that they need to be in specific cars to be able to exit.
I doubt that moves the needle a lot unless you're making _everything_ fully automatic, i.e. including the infrastructure creation & maintenance and streamline that extremely well.
If you take a ride from Hamburg to Berlin with the ICE, there's maybe 8 staff on board, 200-300 passengers, it takes ~2 hours and the average ticket price is 77€ according to some travel app.
Even if you get rid of all 8 of them, the price per ticket isn't going to be lowered significantly.
But there is also the ~80 staff manning stations at each end and along the route, and more staff in the control room, the cleaning staff, the people who manually do maintenance checks every single night, etc.
You can get rid of the cleaning staff right now. The terminals will become disgusting and people will stop using them. There is no way around this type of overhead. If you have larger numbers of people passing through, you need cleaning and maintenance.
Your original point isn’t even true - in California there is constant maintenance of the road network and crews of community service workers doing their sentence cleaning trash on the highway shoulder.
Roads still have far fewer staff per mile than railways, however you measure.
In turn, that makes them cheaper.
Lol, that depends heavily what you consider staff. E.g. look at freight, if you move cargo by trucks you need 1 staff member (sometimes called drivers) per truck. Train on the other hand needs only 2 people per hundreds of meters of train...
Even worse for individual car transport. You need one staff (driver) per vehicle...
Is there a source for this? Is this source heavily context-dependant?
Yeah, it seems that "self-driving trains" are a much, much more tractable problem than self-driving cars. On the other hand, the cost of the driver is amortized over many passengers, and much of the labor isn't driving but rather serving as conductor, etc, so it may not even matter too much.
> automated cleaning of trains inside and out)
For the outside, you can imagine a carwash.
For the inside, my brain goes to scary dystopian places. Like, "what if we make the inside out of chemically-inert glass-based materials, and clean it by immersion in pirhana solution?" One would just need to recycle the solution, and recharge it with hydrogen peroxide. This would rule out the use of plastics in the interior, however.
Maybe something more like a dishwasher could also work, but I'm not sure it'd be Strong Enough for Tough Stains. It could even just make a mess. I've heard stories of Roombas that encounter dog poop; they say it goes badly...
You're not pricing in the primary impact of the subsidy - the value of the travel itself. Those tickets subsidize travel and reduce carbon emissions.
This analysis is too simple. Roads need to be maintained, road accidents are a burden on the national health service and air pollution has a long term negative impact on people's health
Cars also have a huge subsidy in the form of roads
A more fitting complaint about cats would be the Pendlerpauschale, which is paid out to people driving to and from work in their car. It's a much larger sum than the €3b spent on the train ticket subsidy.
There are generally taxes (e.g., car or gas taxes) that cover the costs. I don't know about Germany's situation, but it is not impossible to make that net zero.
Not even close to net zero in Germany. Do you have any examples of countries where car and gas taxes do actually cover the cost of roads?
In Australia, petrol tax raises ~18bn.
Cost of road infrastructure is ~36bn.
And these comparisons often exclude externalities like carbon emissions, pollution from tires and brakes, road accident costs, noise pollution and the cost of suburban sprawl.
If you would even attempt it to make it net zero you would get truly ungodly amounts of pushback, I don't think you understand how bad it would be. Truly, for those used to a privilege, fairness is an attack.
Furthermore: you have a state of affairs where you are pretty much forced to own and drive a car to e.g. get to work or move around. You make it reflect its true cost making it impossible to afford for anyone except the rich. What now?
Roads, highways and gas are massively subsidized, much more per kilometer travelled than rail. I think if you factor in spared road maintenance alone, from travellers using the train instead of their cars, you might see the operation is actually saving public money.
Germany actually subsidises fossil fuels to the tune of €20bn/year, so in that context €3bn doesn't sound so bad. Some of the latest estimates of the true cost per ton of carbon put it around $1000 USD, so in purely economic terms it's still a win.
The cost of carbon capture is not equal to the value it provides to humanity. In fact, not emitting CO2 that you could have, is even more valuable than CO2 you remove later from the atmosphere.
Show me an effective carbon abatement method well under $100.
I suspect that's peanuts compared to all the subsidies and unaccounted externalities for car use.
Secret plan of car driving politicians to decrease the traffic for themselves
Well it's not just a carbon credit, it also provides subsidized public transport to everyone, reduces congestion, improves city air and likely cuts road deaths. Arguably tax dollars extremely well spent.
Except that due to this cheaper ticket congestion on trains is horrible and since the infrastructure is poorly maintained it’s quite common to be late by 1-2 hours while being packed in a sardine tin.
That's a matter of train infrastructure and frequency keeping up with demand. There's a big lag there. You don't just buy 100 new trains overnight. It's a symptom of ramping up. Not of high usage.
I live in Barcelona and here the metro comes every 2-3 minutes. Even during the night it might be 7 minutes. This helps so much with congestion but also trip planning: no need to check train times before you go. Id imagine busy routes in Germany could do similar.
The big benefit of this is also not needing a car. Not having to worry about maintenance, write-off, finding parking and the cost thereof, summer and winter tyres, damage, no-claim bonus, travelling while having drunk, going back from a different place than you arrived. It's so incredibly more convenient than having a car. All at a flat rate of 21€ here.I hope never having to need one again.
€21.35 for a T-Usual card which allows unlimited travel on all public transport for 30 days, yet you still have people in here kicking and screaming to use their car and roads
When you say “carbon abatement” do you mean carbon credits/cleanup or other ways of emitting less of it in the first place?
Disturbingly, your link includes Carbon capture and storage from a fossil power plant, which has never been demonstrated practically and is basically a scam at this point, pushed by oil companies.
Second, you are conflating subsidy with cost. If everyone switches to electric trucks, cost is enormous, but subsidy is zero because private sector pays for it themselves. For electrics freight trains, cost could be lower, but the government has to pay for it.
However, everyone with a grasp of physics knows that freight train is more efficient, so focusing on subsidy is stupid
A big externality is time-savings, and can be calculated.
Why do you need to price them?
Also, there are countries out there where the average tax payer subsidizes car drivers a lot too.
Yes, lets subsidize the aviation and car industry more instead!!
Face it, trains is the better option here.
Bike and walk is best of course but troublesome long distance.
> Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn
and how was this number actually calculated?
https://urban-mobility-observatory.transport.ec.europa.eu/ne...
just around 2 billion
How much does it cost to keep up the motor roads in Germany? Likewise, how much do the externalities of it (like pollution, and massive numbers of deaths and injuries) cost?
Without it this comparison is meaningless.
Who said rail industry should be profitable in the first place?
I would fully support if part of my taxes would subsidize rail industry and I get cheaper prices. Imo good use of tax dollars.
The system simply doesn't have more capacity right now.
Germany neglected or even removed their rail infrastructure, especially for the past 25 or so years, after privatization. These "subsidies" are a course correction.
These investments also make it a real pain to use the system right now, because a lot of lines are closing months at a time and the alternatives are already overloaded. I'd rather have a car for the next 5-10 years too - and I live very central with many connections.
Here's a map of disruptions for reference: https://www.zuginfo.nrw/map.html#!P|HimSearch!histId|1!histK...
Me and my wife are certainly considering getting a car. Cars are a pain in cities, but it would save literally hundreds of hours over the course of even a single year due to just how poor the infra is.
Maybe but it’s also subsidizing travel for people, possibly increasing revenue for tourist spots and restaurants, it could keep people from buying a new ICE vehicle etc. It seems like one of those things that has a lot of benefits outside the immediate situation.
Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Additionally, there are so many apps that resell the ticket as some white label system, so it was very confusing to purchase (you cannot buy them at the machines).
The price hike is the wrong direction here if we are reducing that much time on the road. Kudos though for the great rail systems. The USA has a lot to learn here and it’s baffling how terrible it is here. I doubt I’d ever need a car in Germany given the rail system was much more convenient. In the USA I spend 10-15 mins trying to park any time I go anywhere
> Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket
It influenced the idea to come up with a permanent ticket: the "Deutschlandticket". It started 1. Mai 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandticket
The Deutschlandticket costs max 49 Euros (next year it will cost 58€ per month) and is valid for one month for mostly all local®ional public transport systems (plus a few selected non-regional trains) in the whole of Germany. The subscription will renew automatically.
Companies often support employees by paying some of the costs. Then it typically costs 34.30 € per month. From next year on, employees pay 40,60 € per month max.
Here in my home city already 94% of the 213000 pupils use the Deutschlandticket for 0 € per month. Every pupil has free access to all of the country's local®ional public transport system... I find that kind of mind-blowing.
I have the ticket in my iPhone's wallet and thus also in the Apple Watch wallet. Additionally I need an ID card. Which at some point in time will also come to the smartphone. https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/new-mob...
> Every pupil has free access to all of the country's local®ional public transport system... I find that kind of mind-blowing.
We've had this since the 1990s for higher education students. One of the known effects is that students who got it, used the public transport systems more often after wards as they were more familiar with it. I would not be surprised if Germany has a simmilar effect. The problem with these effect is they far outgrow the attention span of polititians as they take years to come to full force.
When I started studying at university it was an optional additonal fee paid with the Semesterbeitrag and the ticket was only valid in the city (not even the state) and its close surroundings. A bit later they didn't allow us to opt out anymore but lowered the price a bit.
So for students in my region this was never free and still isn't, you are forced to pay for it and can't opt out: https://www.studentenwerk-leipzig.de/mobilitaet/semestertick...
> Studierende der sieben Leipziger Hochschulen im Zuständigkeitsbereich des Studentenwerkes Leipzig zahlen den Beitrag von 176,40 Euro verpflichtend mit der Immatrikulation bzw. Rückmeldung zum Wintersemester 2024/25.
It was only valid for the state in which the university is, and not all universities offered it.
Most students now get the nationwide ticket for effectively about 30€/month.
I only pay 20 EUR a month because a 25 EUR subsidy by my employer. It is a total nobrainer although, I often even use it less, just because I can jump on any local train, tram, bus without worrying about a ticket (particularly as we don't have NFC payment). Actually the 9 EUR will effectively mean a 50% raise for me, so I am not sure if the raise even makes sense economically because people like me just would cancel.
It sounds amazing. All these prices seem crazy low. A significantly zone limited monthly commuter ticket here in Denmark costs over 500€
And if I am not mistaken, as a university student you get also that ticket for free and you just need to show your student card.
So students basically never have to pay for the public transportation which is really awesome.
EDIT: by public transportation I mean whatever is included in the D-Ticket (no Intercity or similar types of trains).
Where I live, students pay for it, 29.40 €. It's a part of the semester fees, IIRC.
For those not familiar with how this works/worked: At most universities, a similar fee was collected from all students. That was then used to finance a regional "public transport flatrate".
N.b.: mk89 is technically not quite correct, it wasn't free (nothing in life is). It's usually bundled with the tuition/enrollment fee.
Implementation details differed per University, but for us the fee (80 or 100€, can't recall) was socialized across all students and payed together with the tuition fee; opting out was not possible (with some exceptions, like disabilities). The money went from the University administration to the AStA - the "general students council" (the executive section of the elected student self-government). The AStA then negotiated with the local public transport company/companies as well as with the Deutsche Bahn (e.g. to get access to certain inter-regional train connections - we still have cooperations with 3 or 4 nearby universities, and students somehow need to get there). Those negotiations can be a royal pita, and often the students were in a weak position.
Source: I was in the AStA (~12 people), but not involved with that task.
"I LOVE the German transit system"
I have some experience with the public transport systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Belgium. In my opinion Germany's is the worst. Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. The tariffs (apart from the Deutschlandticket) are overly complicated and suffer heavily under the common balkanization.
The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
> For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
I am extremely surprised that you would write this. The SNCF Connect app has a lot of problems. Just for starters, it can't cope with any journey with more than 2 changes. SNCF shut down there international ticket sales computer system - because it was too old. They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF.
The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required.
"They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF."
I booked ICE trains run by Deutsche Bahn via SNCF successfully in the past, the last time three days ago. I had them even send me Deutsche Bahn paper tickets for no additional cost. (Not because I wanted them in paper, but because DB insists on their app or paper if it is not an international train)
"The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required."
You can plan that in DB Navigator just fine, but have you ever managed to successfully book such a journey. I admit that my attempts were always in the east-west direction, but I can confidently say that the DB Navigator app bails at the last step of the funnel for these journeys every time, when I can book the same trains via SNCF Connect just fine.
What I love about SNCF connect is that it shows me exactly if a train has free seats and is bookable in the inital step, where DB-Navigator lets me happily compose a whole itinerary only to tell me in the last step before payment one of the trains is booked out. Then I have start the whole process from the beginning, manually steering DB-Navigator to avoid the trains I now know are booked out but DB-Navigator still pretends were available.
I agree that the booking experience of the DB-SNCF cooperation trains sucks from the DB end, but the underlying blame arguably lies with SNCF which insists on compulsory reservations which is against the philosophy of trains in Germany. On the other hand, in my experience DB offers cheaper tickets for these cooperation trains, most of the time.
But these trains are a special case; in other cases DB is clearly far more pleasant.
This is not primarily a problem of the cooperation trains, I have the same situation with trains within Germany. DB-Navigator only tells you if a train is bookable right at the end, right before payment. Before that, it might show "there is high demand", but this is rather useless, especially when you have a school kid and want to book a train a the beginning or end of school holidays, when every train is in high demand. Your only chance with DB-Navigator is to play the whack-a-mole game where you run all the steps repeatedly until the very last step until you find a train you actually can book.
In the SNCF app I have this information right away, that is what makes the difference for me.
So much this. I often use DB navigator to plan trips within france. As soon as you're not going to or from Paris, the sncf offer and app are just terrible. Often, sncf-connect will refuse to offer me TER-only (regional train) trips, because one of the legs can also be done by TGV. Basically impossible to plan this kind of thing with the SNCF apps.
But even the basic UX is terrible. The most blatant example of this is the choice to make the first text input on the search the target station. If you do limit yourself to a single text input as the entry point to the search, I see the intuition. but the result is that they are the only transit search mask I know where I have to first type where I'm going, and then where I'm coming from. I hate it.
"But even the basic UX is terrible. The most blatant example of this is the choice to make the first text input on the search the target station."
This is just your preference and not terrible UX. In fact I find this the more intuitive way.
I don't know about apps (only used the HVV app, for holding a ticket), but in terms of websites SNCF (at least the English version, the French one is a bit better) is an absolute mess. There is like 3 different ones for starters, one to find a connection, one to buy the ticket and one to find current status/delays.
bahn.de is actually one of the more decent websites in my opinion (definitely better than most rail sites I have encountered).
That said, the biggest problem with rail in Europe atm, is the lack of an integrated ticketing system. Going between places by train is a so much nicer experience than taking the plane, but the ticketing experience is such a mess. As others have pointed out, on SNCF you can't find any international connections any longer (IIRC SJ.se in Sweden still shows connections to Norway and Denmark), on Bahn.de you can find the connections, but can't actually see a price or book a ticket (you are told to go into a station). Train travel in Europe could be a surely awesome otherwise.
The EU should create a standardised system for tickets in Europe, similar to the New Distribution Capability for flights or SEPA for payments.
There should also be a unified system for passengers to claim their money back if their train is delayed.
EU has asked the rail companies to do so or else they will force their hand if they don’t.
One fun experience, arriving in München and trying to buy ticket for the airport train online. The app requires your birthdate. The date selector starts from present and only allows to go back one month at a time. So if you're 40 years old, you would need to click 480 times... We bought paper tickets from a machine . Machines work well compared to other countries though.
I thought the same thing first, but if you click on the year you can choose from a list.
I can't tell for other countries, but SNCF digital solutions have been a great example of everything you should not do for as long as I can remember. Actually bahn.de used to be a far better interface to consult french train hours than whatever fancy new name SNCF would come every few months or so.
I couldn't disagree more. You can say a lot of bad things about Deutsche Bahn, but of all the travel apps I have used, DB Navigator and bahn.de were the best.
SNCF Connect, on the other hand, not only had a terrible UX, but also crashed randomly, forcing me to use third-party apps to buy SNCF tickets.
The DB navigator app is actually decent. The one downside is it kicks you out to a website to book many international tickets, but you can still plan and track your journey delays etc. in the app.
It kicks you out to a website if you are lucky (I had this when traveling through Austria), but often it just says: "Sorry, I cannot book this for you.".
In any case you will have to start from scratch, which is in my opinion the worst UX.
It is good that the app allows to research all theoretically possible connections, but I want the info if I can practically book a connection right there in the process and not just at the end. The SNCF-Connect app shows that this is possible, and even possible for Deutsche Bahn trains.
I just used the DB Navigator for extensive travel in Germany without any problems. It doesn't provide quite as much information about how to deal with connections for a delayed train, but that is minor compared to the very transparent function for buying and displaying tickets.
As a tourist I agree, and the Deutschland Ticket App is Region locked, so you are bound to the complexity of the system, which seems unnecessary and way too expensive as opposed to the ticket locals get.
There are many different vendors with different apps.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible
It's not terrible. I managed to book all my train travels just fine with it, also using a business bahncard which gives me a 50% discount on all trains.
I couldn't pay for my ubahn with a credit card on the bahn, and the app required me to use some kind of a paypal derivative. I did not pay.
Regardless of whether it is digitized or not, regional trains suck. To pay on the train, I think I was forced to use cash.
Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email. Or was it snail mail? I didn't attempt it, I just saw that my train was delayed for hours with no explanation for what can I do about it, realized I'm missing my connection and then booked a plane ticket and got home faster than if I had traveled by rail without any delays. 10/10, will fly whenever possible from now on.
Pay before. That's how the transport systems generally work in Germany. In many trains you need to have a ticket BEFORE entering the train and also BEFORE entering the platform in the train station.
> Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email.
I can do that in the DB app.
The DB app? Definitely was not an option for the people who did that. Granted, we are europeans, not Germans living in Germany.
Paying before just isn't always practical, but I understand that such limitations are often a non-issue for locals.
If you don't pay before, and the train doesn't have a ticket machine on it (most don't, but some e.g. trams in Berlin do) you are riding illegally. That's how it works in Germany.
> The DB app? Definitely was not an option for the people who did that.
Yeah, it's in the app.
> Paying before just isn't always practical, but I understand that such limitations are often a non-issue for locals.
That's how it works. Typical here for local trains: there are no barriers in train and bus stations. One can just enter the train and bus without any ticket check. But you have to make sure that you have a ticket. The local trains have no installation to buy a ticket anymore. Typically one would buy them online or have a subscription ticket. How does the system make sure that people pay and don't game the system? There are random checks.
If you want a ticket, buy it before entering a train. Train stations have either ticket systems or a ticket office. But most people by now do it online either per website or app.
For long-distance trains I would always book in advance (it's often also cheaper) and book a seat, too.
Yeah, cool, I understand, it is how it is done. I am not arguing that, and I already conceded that.
Why are you bringing the same argument back up again?
Have you considered that people who travel through your country will not install another app on their phone? I do not need another quarter of a gigabyte app to pay for something that could've been paid for via VISA or Mastercard. Oh wait, I did install the app. And it asked me to use a paypal account. I do not carry my papyal credentials with me.
I have never gotten on long distance trains and expected to pay on them, not what I am arguing about.
And when I mean that the app was not an option, I mean that in our case, we couldn't use the app to submit a return. I was not the one submitting those forms, I was too lazy. The people who did told me the app did not work for their case. Given that you've told me 2x that "you can just do it in the app", what else can I say besides the fact that when tried, it did not work? Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why?
All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?
> Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why?
The DB App has this option, now. That's all. If this information does not help you, there are other readers here, too.
> All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?
You can buy with credit cards (and a few other options) using the usual payment terminals. Again, you usually have to pay outside of the train. The terminals are at the train station.
That's how it works.
That's how it works in Germany. Everywhere else I just swipe my mobile and I am done.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
SNCF, SNCB and EuroStar let me manage my tickets digitally in my digital wallet. That is super convenient if you have more complicated itineraries because you have all the tickets handy in a single app, when you need them.
With Deutsche Bahn it is either their app or a PDF to print.
For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.
You can forget about that anywhere in Germany. It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.
That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
I did a more complicated trip with multiple legs. Booked via SNCF, bc DB-Navigator would not let me book some of the border crossing legs, I tried. The only leg that required a paper ticket was in Germany. In 2023, not last century.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
While DB Navigator does leave something to be desired the sheer width/breadth of the DB booking system makes it my go-to choice for international train travel. They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips - from Sweden to the Netherlands - which I make about every other month. I can get prices directly without having to go through some silly booking agency, I can book tickets, reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want (something which doesn't always work). They did have some problems about a year ago when they moved to the 'new' DB Navigator and the price I was quoted suddenly quadrupled, this turned out to be an omission in the booking system which I submitted a bug report for. They fixed the problem and prices returned to where they should be (about 5% higher than before the change, they used the opportunity to raise prices...).
No, the problem with DB is not to be found in their app or the booking system, those are at least on par and often better than their foreign equivalents. The problem lies in the unreliability of the long distance network, especially the ICE service which often sees long delays due to a lack of personnel, defective equipment, maintenance work, etc. Regional services tend to be more reliable, in part due to the higher frequency which makes it less of a problem if a single train does not run. All in all I can live with the problems and have switched over to rail travel whenever I can in Europe. The advantages - more space, more comfort, no security theatre, the ability to hack away while travelling, usually lower prices, I can take as much luggage as I can carry (which is a lot) - outweigh the disadvantages - longer travel times, need to change trains, delays which compound due to missing connections.
They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours
There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.
which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips
That is something we can agree upon.
reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want
SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
> There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.
The way they implemented this process makes it easy and quick to get compensation while other carriers - who are supposed to follow the same rules - make it quite a bit harder to get compensated.
> SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
You can do the same on bahn.de or in DB Navigator (which is mostly equivalent to a canned version of the site plus a few extras). Not all trains allow seat selection, sometimes seats are assigned automatically. Other trains - e.g. Dutch Intercity trains - do not offer reservation at all. The Swedish/Danish Öresundståg (a service running mostly in the south and west of Sweden) theoretically allows reservation but this hardy ever works, at least when booking through DB. Do mind that I use DB to book trips crossing several countries using different operators, in this case SJ (Swedish state railway), Öresundståget, DSB (Danish state railway), DB, Eurobahn and NS (Dutch state railway). All in a single booking with a single payment and a single point of contact using a single ticket.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes,
It is for that reason I'd love it. Accessible, universal, sustainable, resilient technology!
I once got stuck in Nuremberg overnight. The ticket office was open all night and an official looked up all my options from memory and timetable books and wrote me a diagram with pen and paper that perfectly showed me how to get to my destination. I'll never forget that helpful clerk.
Not saying you can't have your apps, but systems that lose touch with reality and human involvement are part of the emerging problem.
For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket. Simply genius.
> For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket. Simply genius.
I think you're giving a little too much credit. In the nearby Czech Republic we had a system where there'd be eight (or perhaps 10?) places for a hole. Your ticket would get marked with a combination specific to the vehicle.
They'd periodically change which vehicle has what holes. With 8 holes, 256 tickets would be enough to give you a valid ticket for any vehicle. With 10 holes, 1024 tickets. I think some people carried around all the tickets to be able to ride for free. Others kept tickets with small number of holes for later reuse in a vehicle which had a superset of those. Good times!
I find it very hard to believe the Hungarians has something smarter than that, but would love to be proven wrong!
There simply has to be a web page about this somewhere...
>Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes
I want to buy a ticket every now and then. I want that process to be straight forward: cash money for one-time ticket. I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
Paper based offline processes forever, please.
I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
Exactly, no one wants that, no one needs that, but you should recognize that most people don't want to handle cash money either, nowadays.
Just let me swipe my card or phone and done.
If you insist on privacy we should be able to use a pre-paid card or temporary credit card (like Revolut), but I have not tried that and I doubt it works.
lol you know websites exist right. what a luddite approach. Paper is expensive, wasteful, environmentally harmful, and time consuming.
I don't carry a phone around with me at all times. Phones are expensive, wasteful, socially and environmentally harmful, time consuming, and they erode our freedoms.
Sure. And how do you pay? I mean, really. You're forced to create an account, then link a payment method (PayPal and/or Visa/Mastercard may or may not be supported, Apple Pay almost never is). Sometimes you also have to link a mobile phone number or the number is the account identifier.
How is that an alternative?
I’d love to see an in-depth analysis of the overall production costs for paper and ink vs electronic. Tree to processing to ticket vs smartphone, grid, network, software, and so on. I imagine the paper process is exceptionally cheaper but I could very well be wrong.
Paper is fine for the environment. Paper takes an absolutely tiny portion of a tree (and burning the pulp waste tends to result in a net energy surplus from the pulp mill!), whereas the amount of energy to create one computer (even a phone) is massive.
> I doubt I’d ever need a car in Germany given the rail system was much more convenient
Sure, if you live in a larger city and you never leave… I lived in Munich for years and never needed a car, just comfortable shoes, a bike and occasionally a transport ticket.
Try to get to a smaller town or village, you are lucky if you only spend twice as much time getting there as with a car.
The trains get randomly cancelled, delay is basically guaranteed, the workers go on strikes relatively frequently, so you can never rely on trains working for anything remotely important.
> You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Pro tip: some websites offer to start the subscription later in the month and you only pay for those days. So if, for example, you were to attend a certain hacker conference in Hamburg at the end of December, you could buy the ticket for the last 5 days of the month for 49/31*5 euro. Just have to cancel before 10th of December so that it doesn't renew. ("HVV Switch" App)
Surprised how positive you're writivg about the German public transport. The Deutsche Bahn doesn't have a good reputation in central Europe.
I guess my frame of reference isn't average, given I live in Switzerland.
Edit: the 49-euro ticket is great though!
As a UK citizen living in Berlin, I assure you that for all the cancellations and repair works, there's many places which look up to the German system.
(I've also been to the USA, and (IMO) Amtrak makes the UK look good).
The UK is so expensive though. I thought I was looking at airplane fares.
I recently needed two tickets from NYC to LA, and was astonished to find air tickets for $80 and rail tickets for $2200. It's so unbelievably expensive (not counting that the flight was a few hours and the train was 56 hours).
Very disappointing! How is it so expensive?!
> If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Just in case this is helpful to someone, you can buy the ticket from one of those different transport organizations you mentioned and avoid that time limit to cancel. The one to use for that is https://www.mopla.solutions/, it's a simple app (alternatively web site) that worked really well for me (no affiliation).
It started with 9€, is 49€ now, and will be 58€ starting 2025.
You can buy for a single month when booking through the right company. "mo.pal" is a good one, for example. However, I agree that it is a bit predatory.
> Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
The €9 ticket was a 3 month temporary offer, which was not originally intended to continue permanently at all.
> I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
The ticket is subsidised by the German government(beyond the amount that all rail infrastructure and most services are subsidised) for the purpose what is covered in the article - encouraging permanent modal shift of regular travellers(primarily commuters) from road to rail. If you're a tourist, it's not meant for you. Sorry.
Airtravel is also subsidised by the German tax payer. Much more than the 49 EUR ticket. No matter if you are a tourist or not. (Arguably mostly for tourists actually.)
What's the method of subsidy there? Contributing to Airbus shares?
Commercial aviation fuel is tax exempt in the EU, I would already count that as a subsidy (yes, I count not taxing something that's normally taxed as a subsidy, even if it isn't done by directly paying out money).
Subsidising airports and fuel, presumably.
> If you're a tourist, it's not meant for you. Sorry.
Tourist&foreigners can use the Deutschlandticket, too.
But: it's a monthly subscription automatically renewing every month, so one has to cancel it early enough when planning to leave the country. You'll also typically need a smartphone for the ticket.
Well, on mobile they make you think you need the app, but it's region locked. I happened to email them about how this is annoying for tourists yesterday and got a very German response,
"Downloading the Deutschlandticket.de app from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store is only possible in certain countries." (ikr, it's THE problem)
Is a response repeating the thing you just concluded in your mail to them very german?
The problem may be that if they offer the app in foreign regions, they are liable to the jurisdiction of those foreign regions.
The ticket is available by other apps, too.
>I LOVE the German transit system
What? How? I have the ticket and despite that I never use any regional train because they're generally awful. (Local busses and trams on the other hand work pretty well)
Regional trains are really okay compared to long-distance trains. These are so bad that it's unlikely that you reach your destination on time now.
True, significant only because offered for 9 EUR initially.
Not only — when I visit friends in the UK, I've had single rail tickets cost more than the increased next years' cost of a monthly nationwide ticket here in Germany.
Germany is smaller than California. The United States is very, very large place, mostly unpopulated. It’s hard to apply whatever Germany, a small, densely populated country does to the US, which is largely empty land.
Why do we have to pretend that routes between Montana and South Dakota have to come up when discussing ways of improving rail usage in the US? We could treat routes between Chicago, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis like Germany. We could treat high speed rail in California or the Northeast like Japan. Choosing to live in an extremely rural area shouldn't just be a "well it doesn't help" me trump card to defeat things that will help most of the population.
Exactly. Always somebody trots out invalid arguments about size and population density. There are smaller states in the USA that are about as dense as Germany, like Maryland and Connecticut. So, why don't those states have great state-wide public transit systems?
We also have a similarly frustrating kind of arguments in germany itself.
Like, focus on public transport won't work. Because in some tiny towns of 30k people living there, there is never a bus around so why care? Like... dude. In Hamburg, we have subway stations that move more people in minutes than people live in your town. Yes, it may not work on your case. Your case is however a side note. It needs consideration, but not focus.
Or electric vehicles. There are interesting questions about electric vehicles in uncontrolled situations, emergency services and long-distance situations. As well as regions without a good charging infrastructure. Yes. These are problematic. Except, most likely, more unique cars drive past my window in an hour on a workday than exist in that tiny town. Just keep your ICE car for the trip to spain you never take by car, but we should optimize the vehicles in cities. Again, it needs consideration, but not focus.
The politics at the national level are likely to be that states not helped by this vote against it.
Yep, federal income tax is a big reason. For states to fund this on their own requires additional taxation. Some places like FL don’t even have a state income tax, so they are stuck trying to get tourists to fund transportation projects somehow or increasing sales taxes or higher tolls. And of course higher tolls have the unfortunate side effect of reducing demand for the thing to begin with.
Maybe we should work on making one vote to be equal in the nation.
This is a boring trope. Whether it’s a group of United States or a single State is a debate as old as the country. You’re going to need really compelling reasons for states to give up their representation and participate in the state vote required to amend the constitution to remove their rights.
> states to give up their representation
> their rights
You talk about states as if they are people. But they are not. States are a fiction invented by people (and let's be honest, by rich and powerful people), and so they can be torn down by people (likely not the rich and powerful).
"State representation" and "states' rights" are not compelling to most people, other than via some vague appeal to "isn't it great that New Mexico can do one thing and Maine can do something else?", which by itself does not require "state representation" or the current ideas of "states' rights".
It was a valid debate back when travelling to the capitol took months by horse. Nowadays everyone uses services from other states on a daily basis, and possibly work in another state (with WFH) on a daily basis. It's pretty darn clear that the USA simply could not exist as a bunch of separate states anymore.
And frankly, states are already giving up their representation in the current system. If you're not a swing state, you're irrelevant. If you live in a populated state, you have a second-class vote.
If the USA had a modern voting system and anyone proposed the current pile of junk, they would be laughed out of the room.
Because those states are part of the same federal government and they have a say in what the federal government does. These rail systems almost always require federal government level investments.
Another significant issue is that the USA wasn’t built for rail, and to do so now requires sign off by land owners, municipalities, and so on. The amount NIMBY-oriented policies in California, for example, is a serious impediment. Oddly, people cite rural areas as an issue, but rural areas aren’t typically an issue. It would be comparably inexpensive to run high speed rail over undeveloped land, while tearing up buildings, roads, water, sewer, and power would be tremendously costly. For much of Europe, rail transport was put in place long before automobiles became commonplace. For much of the USA, the cities didn’t even exist at that time, and they were mostly built around automobiles.
And how many people regularly commute across the United States? The absolute majority of the journeys people make regularly is still quite short, so why not start by optimizing for them? Then continue with building high speed intercity connections between the urban areas with <500 km distance to create valuable alternatives to being stuck in the highway traffic and dealing with the airport security nonsense.
Why do you always think that you need to reinvent a tried and true solutions that have been proven to work across the world?
Also even if you're worried about going cross-country, that requires what, two fast lines between the coasts to get good routes? So even though those areas don't have many people per square mile, passing through would need an extremely small amount of track per square mile.
Look, nobody is talking about Nebraska. the density of the east coast is easily high enough to support high speed high quality rail.
That's why they call it "flyover country". Not "railover country".
1. CA is the 3rd largest state in the USA. Do any of the 47 smaller states have something like this?
2. As the unpopulated bits necessarily don't have many people or things to do in them, the cost of subsidising a public transit ticket in those places is necessarily small.
I'm a big fan of public transit, but it's not entirely "baffling" why the US lags European countries (and Japan) - the US is a MUCH larger country.
> the US is a MUCH larger country
with much of the population in a few denser areas, where public transport would make a lot of sense.
The EU is only about half the land area of the USA; Germany is roughly equivalent of the fourth largest US state, Montana, and only CA, TX, and AK are bigger.
Do any states have something equivalent to this?
There’s a happy medium somewhere though and the US doesn’t meet it at all. I can’t even take a bus from my neighborhood in a California city to the grocery store in a timely manner and it’s often cancelled
Oh, I know - I live in Oakland. I think even here the population density is lower than in European cities. (It's definitely lower than in Asian mega-cities.)
But yes, I do wish California did better. People are used to bad transit, and have never visited Tokyo or even NYC, so expectations are low.
The size "excuse" is often brought up, I don't think that's valid though, e.g. Sweden with a significantly lower density has much better public transport. Or if we talk absolute size I think even Russia has a better rail transport system than the US for example. Like usual I think it can largely be attributed politics and to the strength of the car lobby in the US (as well as a weird desire to "stick it to poor people"), which caused a complete focus on individual travel.
Somehow that wasn't as much of an obstacle in 1920!
But the DC to Boston line isn't
I don't have the details, but every single time I have heard the mention of Deutsche Bahn in the last few years it has been accompanied by comments of how broken it has become, with constant delays and cancellations, to the point where for many people it is no longer a viable option for commute or for anything where you cannot risk to be up to several hours late.
I guess it's all relative. If you come to rely on an excellent and omnipresent rail service for many years as a society, the impacts are quite big when it stops working well. If the service itself is built assuming reliability, where transferring between trains is common, then issues can get substantially amplified if that choreography gets somewhat disrupted.
There is a big reporting bias though. You won't see in the news "of the 40,000 railway connections today, most were on time". You only read about some train having had an AC issue or the like.
I have family in Germany and they never go by train but tell me regularly about how bad the train has become. They have literally not been in one for 15+ years. But they watch the news every day.
among intercity trains run by Deutsche Bahn, the on-time rate hovers around 2/3. it's technically true that "most were on time", but one third being late is really terrible, especially since you often need to make a tight connection.
even if your family has no justifiable basis for believing what they do about DB, they happen to be correct by luck.
https://ibir.deutschebahn.com/2023/en/combined-management-re...
Long-distance trains are worse statistically because they travel longer Router and therefore have more opportubities to gain delay. Across all trains, puncuality is like 95%.
that is true, but tons of highly frequent on-time commuter trains doesn't help anyone who wants to travel long distances.
right now if you want to go between two cities you always have to plan on missing your connection.
>There is a big reporting bias though. You won't see in the news "of the 40,000 railway connections today, most were on time". You only read about some train having had an AC issue or the like.
I feel most know about Japan's shinkansen being run well.
For those who don't, the average delay is 1.1 minutes on average.
For comparison, the DB long distance trains are considered on time if they're less than 6 minutes late, and still only 64% are considered on time.
> Japan's shinkansen
They have dedicated tracks. In Germany all train lines (freight, local trains, long-distance trains) share the same tracks and especially at different speeds this causes delays and problems.
Building new track or even adding more lanes is extremly difficult because of NIMBY's and from 1995 to 2005 switches and extra lanes for overtaking where build back to save costs.
Additionally signalling is in large parts still very labour intensive and smaller tracks are often still running with technology from the early 20th century and late 19th century.
So the problem Deutsche Bahn has to solve is quite a bit harder than shinkansen.
Long distance trains are getting more unreliable (ICE, IC) due to repair works on the tracks - regional / local trains are mostly fine (at least in my place here) and I can't remember the last time there was an delay longer than 10 minutes here. However lately I've saw that trains are cancelled due to manpower shortages and due to the nature the local trains are organized (there is a tender and a railway company wins that tender for 5 years with the same rolling stock) peaks in capacity like on the weekend are not dealt with.
It was broken long before the offer though so the reduction in driving being moderate probably reflects fewer shifts in daily commute and mostly more leisure usage.
> is a bit predatory
what bugs me the most is that i can only book it for a specific calendar month. that is _so_ stupid ...
It's pretty awesome, but it gets more expensive all the time.
First it started as 9€ ticket for 3 months.
People loved it, and the government talked about doing a permanent 29€ ticket.
But now we pay 49€ and it's already planned to become 59€.
Really sad, as it isn't affordable for poor people anymore.
Remember that it cost a small rent to get this subscription until the 9€ experiment. Flat fee national transport, I don't remember the exact price but it's multiple hundreds a month in both the Netherlands (NS altijd/trein vrij) and Germany (Bahnkarte 100). Even my local subscription to go ~10km between two cities in Germany (NRW) cost 90€ a month until that experiment
A nationwide subscription for 60 euros is a steal, even when the long distance trains are excluded
Doesn't Germany have an extremely large social safety net?
Who are these poor people that don't have 49€ for a month of transportation, and how are they possibly surviving without that much money - given the cost of everything else in Germany?
Well you'll usally have 563€/month as a single or 506€/month if living with a partner. State pays health insurance and rent (up to a certain limit in size of the flat). In most cities it's further subsidized (25-29€ for the 49€ ticket).
If that's enough depends a lot where you live, if you have family or not and your livestyle.
You have to pay your energy bills (40-70€/month) and internet / cell-phone (40-50€/month) for yourself.
If you are a healthy single it's perfectly fine if you life a simple life. But you can't really put aside any savings.
> Really sad, as it isn't affordable for poor people anymore.
Depends. In my city "poor" people pay less. Just 19 € per month. Pupils don't pay at all. Students pay 29.40 €.
> First it started as 9€ ticket for 3 months
Someone said in other comment that that 9 ticket was one time only
> That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket
For a developed country, 59 EUR is not all that expensive if it helps you get to a job. Having it be too cheap would probably degrade the quality of service for busier routes and make it harder for future projects to pay themselves off.
It seems the problem might be that pricing is judged independent from externalities. Same with cars and roads.
On the other hand, if price was set to zero, you would get weird over-usage patterns (like people using it for housing or other nonsense)
It's still super affordable for the average worker using these tickets to commute.
It's meant to be an alternative to car drivers which are still gonna save over driving even with multiple hikes ahead.
The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous people.
I took public transit all the time living in Melbourne since it was clean and silent nearly 98% of the time. Same in the Netherlands.
Hundreds of thousands of people use public transit daily in America. Long headways, poor coverage, and lackluster maintenance budgets are a much more important problem than what you're describing.
I take your point but the reality is millions use it daily. Also where it is better more use it. Which is the important point lost to many.
I wish public transit served homeless people as well as a lot of folks like to imagine it does.
A lot of homeless aren't "transients." They aren't just passing through.
If we had excellent public transit to make it easier for homeless people to travel at will, maybe they would be. And maybe their lives would be overall better and they would get less open hatred for being poor and unhoused in a world making it increasingly challenging to get housing for far too many people.
80% of homelessness in the USA is transitional, i.e. someone lost a job or had an injury and needs time to get back on their feet.
Transient: a person who is staying or working in a place for only a short time.
I don't think most people mean someone is only temporarily homeless when they call them transients.
I was in San Francisco recently, and, okay, maybe San Francisco is special or something, but the public transport seemed basically fine? Insofar as it existed; coverage wasn’t great, but it didn’t seem particularly threatening where it existed.
BART is different than most systems. Generally people are talking about buses in my experience. Most trains/subways are relatively tame compared to buses. I was carless for a couple of years in college and had to live off campus to afford rent and riding the bus I encountered more than a few times that made me nervous.
> The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous people.
That's a lie told by people who sell fear as a product to people who always want new reasons to live in fear.
>That's a lie told by people who sell fear as a product to people who always want new reasons to live in fear.
They don't just sell fear. They sell confirmation bias too.
The man who lives in an ivory tower in the suburbs is happy to read the news about a stabbing on the subway as it makes him feel less bad for not putting his money where his mouth is and riding it himself.
This platitude doesn't make the back seats of a greyhound bus any more palatable.
God they were cheap tickets though..
I used to live in Toronto in 2019 to 2020 and used the transit exclusively.
I return as a visitor of Toronto every quarter for work and there are many times where I Uber instead of TTC because of these comments. Even slightly busy at 4-5 PM there's always folks who have hit the gym and skipped showering and most days there's "something" happening on the TTC.
Remember folks, if someone says they don't want to ride transit with a hobo smoking meth, they're lying and they're a bad person. Even if they've previously experienced it firsthand.
I spent years riding public transit in Portland, NYC, Seattle, SF, San Diego, Chicago, and other US cities. I can tell you anecdotally that public transit in the US is dangerous and meant for the poors who don’t have their shit together to level up and commute via car.
Ride 8AM and 5PM every workday for a year and tell me that it’s safe when you roll through the bad parts of Long Island/ brooklyn/Queens or the south side of Chicago. Tell me that you don’t have to take the inconvenient early train because of nTh handicap ramp pickup or last-mile cyclist that slows down your commute. Security on transit only cares about fare collection. The US is not like Europe where there is some latent pride in your ancestors accomplishments.
European here. Spent a week in NYC with a 9 month old. Traveled all over 4 of the 5 boroughs and never felt in the slightest threatened. The only major issue was the lack of elevators. Fortunately NYC people are really friendly and helped us with the stroller every time.
Maybe you came at the right time?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-deploy-750-nationa...
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2024/05/02/new-tea...
The main reason is because Americans are unbelievably wealthy and can afford large homes that require multiple cars for the family to get around. It’s a positive sign of American prosperity and the envy of the world hence the massive immigration demand and relative lack of expatriatism.
If America gets to a point where that’s no longer possible and people have to live in smaller and more densely populated areas not by choice but by necessity then the country is truly in decline.
Let the Germans cram themselves into smaller homes and trains. I truly hope Americans can continue to prosper and acquire comfortable homes with more utility and private transport powered by cheap energy for all.
I think this is one reason why it is rarely expanded, people associate the stops as a way for criminals to get around; but I think usage is not great largely because it hasn't expanded...it's a self-feeding cycle.
This is just false. In the US, when public transport is good by the same measures as other countries use, such as frequency, coverage and so on, Americans use public transport just fine.
The real reason, rather then looking at the most basic surface level is actually the horrible land use planning and the horrible transportation and city engineering. This includes things like zoning, building regulation, environmental regulation and many other things.
The real puzzle imho is to get people to use public transport for the mostly empty route and time combinations. There are many of those for different reasons.
Trains are so heavy it doesnt really cost or save anything if there are people inside or not.
Its like restaurants throwing away food.
I made an argument for making my local public transportation free: https://boehs.org/node/free-the-t
Some of the arguments is based on similar German research, which is cited.
Except this only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs, across the country there are plenty of places where the car is the only viable option.
Germany is a dense country with a developed rail network, you are never far from a train station. Bear in mind that this includes also city transportation, which makes it a great deal.
My gripe with the ticket is that traveling with bikes in regional train became a gamble, you never know if you can get in as there is so many people inside already (and even more when the previous train got cancelled, which happens a lot...)
The density is not that great, its not good enough if you don't have a car.
Yeah, but doesn't make the Bahn more punctual, or reduce those comute times from 3h down to the 1h that is possible by car, not having to jump across four connections, with related delays and dropped connections.
The 49 Euro ticket is about local transportation, when you are talking about 3h you are talking about intercity transportation not covered by this ticket.
Intercity travel has lots of punctuality problems but many of the local train operations and S-Bahn are often much superior. At least in places where I have been, like Karlsruhe, Berlin, Hamburg the local transport has been very good.
Not everything in live is about long distance communing.
> 3h down to the 1h
That completely depends on the details of your route and ignores lots of possible aspects. As a universal statement its just outright false.
> Except this only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs
Every city has public transport.
There is a large density of public transport throughout the country: trains, local trains, underground trains, busses, ferries, ...
The ticket is valid there, too.
There is a big difference between doing 1h with car, and 3h with public transport.
maybe 3 hours in the car and 1h with public transport.
if you are in the rushhour and a traffic jam (not an unusual problem), then the train will be faster. Plus one can work in the train or relax.
My regional train here 20km going into the city center is impossible to beat by car.
77.77% of the people live in cities. 55% live in cities with >20k people. Generally Germany is a decentralized country with a lot of regions with local center cities. There are 15 cities with >500k people. France has only four.
You mean the other way around.
It really depends on a lot of factors but I generally agree that many people vastly overestimate the time savings of taking a car.
And that's before we get into questions like "How many of your hours of paid work are required to make car payments, insurance payments, tag, title and maintenance?"
This helped those people too. There is considerably less traffic cutting commute time significantly.
What's your definition of 'big train station hubs'? There are plenty of places that have small train station that connect to bigger hubs. The claim that its only useful for people close to 'big hubs' is simply false.
Yes there are places where cars are better in some aspects, but that is the case no matter how the ticket is structured. You can't magically extend the train network by reducing ticket price.
And if cars are the only viable option is questionable, as there are many people even in those places who don't own a car. They just have to live with subpar bus system or other local transport.
Well, no, it's primarily about regional travel, so it clearly helps folks near to smaller stations.
Plus: your point, caller? Investing in roads only helps folks with cars. There are plenty of people for whom public transport is the only option.
1h car, 3h public transport, that is the point.
True, but that's how trains work.
As a counter example I live in Rome where city trains are the best public transport available and house prices are heavily linked to closeness to subway or train station, yet we still are the city with most cars per capita in Europe and probably in the whole west.
If only those living close to train stations used trains it would massively reduce the need for cars and consequently the heavy traffic we usually experience.
I live 15 minutes walking from the closest station and it's so much better to go to work by train than by car, the trip is shorter, I don't have to drive, find a parking spot, a legal one, where I can't be fined and don't have to pay for it, while on the train I can read and air conditioning actually works and train cars are usually not crazy full like subway ones.
TL:DR that's how trains work they are not supposed to solve every commuting problem but the solvable ones
It helped anybody and everybody that wanted to travel for any reason. It meant I could go to the nearest big city to catch a movie at an IMAX theatre, something that was significantly more expensive before. You don't need a big train station hub to have trains, and you only need a few trains or buses to make up for the cost and make it worth it. Since, you know, it applies to buses as well. I live in a small shithole town, and it's extremely convenient to have the Deutschlandticket because it means I can take the bus to anywhere in the area, including the nearest train station, and I can take a train to anywhere I want from nearby towns to cities hours away. Even though I own a car again, I still have the ticket because of how useful it is and how much money it saves.
I don't understand how anybody can paint this as a bad thing. Are you also against universal health care by any chance?
Just about all of which used to have train service, right?
I mean, in the US I've been to a lot of small towns where there is no train service, but the old station is still there, with the rails all torn out and replaced with houses, or roads, or bike paths.
And in the UK, the infamous Beeching cuts in the 1960s removed lines based on a profitability model which wasn't applied to roads, causing many communities to lose rail service and essentially require everyone there to shift to cars (replacing trains with bus service failed.)
How much of Germany is like that, where the people in the country insisted on good roads for their cars, causing the rail system to be decommissioned, and now they are stuck with that decades-old decision to prioritize the more environment destroying option?
Most beeching stations were of no use- the service wasn’t there. The village my son’s school is at had a station, a mile out the middle, with 5 trains a day. You would have to change to another train to get to a station with a regular service to London, and increasing services wouldn’t be possible without significantly increasing terminal capacity.
Menawhile the far larger village I live in has never had a station.
Some lines would be useful nowadays and could possibly be worthwhile, but there was no realistic way to know which should have been kept in the 60s. Far better would be to stop all the nonsense and just start digging new lines. But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels. Billions the m40 never had to spend.
> But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels
Some political groups will never be happy, I wonder if better strategy is confrontating them then appeasing them. At least would have kept the budget down
People talk a lot of nonsense about 'Beeching cuts' without really understanding the history. 'Beeching' has simply become a political buzzword anybody who knows even a little about rail likes to bandy about.
Lines started closing around the 1930s and after WW2 this continued. Beeching was only working on this topic a short time and produced a report that suggested lots of things. Some of those things were done, others weren't. Cuts happened before Beeching and after him. And they happened during various different railroads organization schemes.
That it was strictly about profitability is also false. If anything it was about cost. They believed in future buses (and yes cars) would take car of those communities. At that time bus services were often government run.
And Beeching was actually correct in many cases. The British rail system was simply not rationally build. It was basically built by partly speculation driven rush. While this is not a bad and certainly gave Britain a great rail system, once you have centralized control it does actually make sense to reevaluate. Lots of lines didn't make rational sense to continue.
Now of course I agree that to many lines were closed that shouldn't have been closed. But that is only a small part of the issue with the rail system. Britain still has a pretty high rail density.
Well, of course, if we didn't have traffic ministers again and again, who do everything they can to make rail less attractive and road more attractive, then we could probably have a great system. But automobile lobby is so strong, they buy all the politicians in that role, probably even before they land in that role, so I guess normal people will have to keep suffering, so that those politicians can have a life of luxury. Thank you.
I have to admit the ‘all access’ ticket system was pretty awesome when I visited. Note that this did not include trains going into Austria (even if you road them only in Germany). Nearly every city is joined by rail and it’s incredible.
Sadly in the US Midwest we just don’t have there population density to do this sort of thing.
This last week we would've probably all seen the photos of the gridlock on I-75 as Tampa Bay residents fled Hurricane Milton. If you followed the story you know it eventually became almost impossible to evacuate.
We should also know how much more efficient buses are on roads at moving people than individual cars are. You can fit ~60 people on a bus that takes up the space of ~2 cars.
What should happen in these emergencies is there should be dedicated bus lanes and dedicates buses to evacuate people.
But beyond that, what we should learn from this is that lack of public transit (intracity and intercity) is a public safety issue. Cars simply aren't an efficient use of resources.
You can see from the comments here people will talk about "subsidies" for rail. Why does rail need to turn a profit? Roads don't. The Post Office doesn't. The Fire Department doesn't. Yet for some reason we hold public transport infrastructure to a higher standard.
Americans, in particular, love their cars. And there has been a powerful lobbying operation to associate rail with tax increases. This is so short-sighted because nobody is confiscating your car. Fewer people on the roads will improve your driving experience and travel times.
We see in the UK that it's cheaper to fly to Spain than to take intercity train journeys. As far as I'm concerned, citywide rail (eg the Tube in London, the NYC Subway) should be free and intercity rail should have a nominal cost that is cheaper than driving.
Would be interesting to see if the subsidy is covered by additional economic activity to cover the shortfall. If not it won’t last long, money doesn’t grow on trees
It does when maintaining roads, apparently.
On the other hand the Bundeswehr burns through 50 billion a year to do fuck all, so apparently it does indeed grow on trees.
Military spending is a bit of an odd one. It's basically expensive by design and ideally doesn't have any real effect.
It's not far off from a proof-of-work system. Especially given how there are many cheaper options to get rid of an enemy, but those have been outlawed such that the only options remaining are costly in people, money and goods.
> there are many cheaper options to get rid of an enemy, but those have been outlawe
I'm curious. What are these options?
I really really would like to see Labour in the UK to use their sizeable majority + Parliamentary sovereignty to upgrade the UK’s infrastructure, including more train subsidies, but they seem very cautious and also terrified of raising taxes. Such a waste that the UK is one of the few places where Parliament could just ram shit through and yet building anything in the UK is so hampered by self-imposed red tape.
15 years of all major parties supporting hs2 and it couldn’t be rammed through
Want to improve things for people in the UK, ram through massive new housing akin to the newtowns of 50 years ago.
> through massive new housing akin to the newtowns of 50 years ago
New towns will just be full of commuters and have no life in them. We need to build high rises in cities, and give people living in apartments real rights - the leasehold system is feudalism.
And give Manchester and Birmingham real metro/tube systems!
HS2 was an ongoing project, it was threw. It was simply cancled by a fucking asshat person who tried to appeal to the far right in a series of stunts to save his sorry ass.
New housing has to be built along transportation corridors. If you want to efficiently build housing, you have to extend transportation infrastructure into areas and then grow towns around that.
This isn't actually hard and has been done for 100 years but somehow in modern day many countries are to stupid to understand this.
Lots of people seem surprised that the new government apparently have no desire to improve the dire state of the UK. But that was never on the cards and the idea that they might have done so is pure projection. The current leadership of the Labour party are from the right-wing Labour First faction who have always been very clear that their aims are not to improve the country but to keep the left out of power. They will govern in the same business-as-usual nothing-can-ever-get-better vein as the Tories and their Blairite predecessors.
However I don't blame the public for not knowing this fact. There was (and to some extent still is) a media lockdown on reporting who is behind the Starmer project. (Because if it had been reported on it might not have succeeded).
As someone that avoids the german rail at all costs I applaud this move, the freer the roads and airports are for me, the better.
Exactly. I don't understand why most car owners are so opposed to public transport.
the same reason omnivores are sometimes highly critical of veg*ns: there's a moral claim going on, so their identity/ moral standing is threatened.
It's not a question of moral standing or identity but rather that public transport (and vegan) advocates would like to force you to live like they do. Those things gaining too much popularity threatens the way you do things.
We have examples of this happening, eg smoking. It has become unpopular enough that governments pass nonsensical bans like banning flavored cigarettes or just making it entirely illegal for only a certain year cohort (literal age discrimination).
> public transport (and vegan) advocates would like to force you to live like they do
Is there a citation for this claim?
> governments pass nonsensical bans like banning flavored cigarettes
Is it nonsensical? There is research[1][2] showing that flavoured tobacco is one of the primary factors used to attract younger users. We know that tobacco is bad, and also that flavoured tobacco increases its usage, so unless you are against public health policy measures themselves, it follows logically that flavoured tobacco should be covered by public health measures.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9007155/ [2] https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/26/6/709
When public health measures turn into "hello, we're now making your life worse" then yes, I am against them.
Imagine you drink coffee your whole life. You rely on it. Now your government comes in and goes "coffee is now illegal, you're welcome!!!"
It changes your life against your wishes and you can't do anything about it. The only action that realistically works is preemptive - don't let coffee become disliked enough to enact such a ban. That's why people argue against it. Principles such as "people should be free to make their own choices" aren't values our society cares about. (Important to remember: it's popular to hate on things everyone else hates on, so you gotta keep it under a critical mass.)
>Is there a citation for this claim?
Asking for a citation doesn't make sense. You know damn well there isn't one. Nobody is going to credibly announce that their goal is to ban something popular, because that would make it harder for them to force that change on you. It's done piece by piece. Maybe the people that start it don't even want a ban, but it eventually escalates.
But logical reasoning can explains it too: people support public transport for climate reasons. Why would they not want you to make 'the right choice' like them?
Vegans? Veg[a..z1..9A..Z]ns? Are there any vegyns out there who object to being put on the meat/no-meat spectrum? Are you afraid HN will censure you if you spell out the complete word?
Really now. It's obviously veg.+ns: vegans and vegetarians.
Oh aha thanks for pointing that out. Now that you mention it that does seem obvious. I definitely didn't catch that from the first use though. There should be a better word to capture both those meanings that doesn't confuse my poor regex sensibilities like that. :|
My regex sensitivities only warned me about the persecution of veggggggggns.
It's a regular veganza in here. (I'm sorry)
I didn't get that either; not that obvious after all! I thought they were making a joke about vegan being a swear/taboo word, given the context of saying people don't want to hear of it because it allegedly threatens their morality
It takes forever compared to driving in most cases, catching the transit often involves a walk, and a lot of public transit is kind of grungy. This doesn't apply or matter as much in some cases (e.g. the NY subway) but in general it's not great, at least not in the USA.
Walking is good for you.
Doesn't that depend on one's weight? Or was that jogging/running
>catching the transit often involves a walk
Tell me you're American without telling me you're American.
Does transit not always involve a walk, even a small one? It's not like everyone lives next to a subway station, and most destinations aren't right next to a subway station either.
Personally I'm not opposed to public transport, in fact I want to like the railway. I tried. But the German railway is in such a poor state that I never use it. Not for small trips (with regional trains that are covered by my 49€ ticket) and especially not for longer trips (long distance trains like ICEs).
Every time you enter an ICE just remember that its a coinflip on whether or not you'll arrive on time to get your connecting train. Or maybe you won't arrive at all, happened enough times to me that I frankly don't trust it anymore. And considering how expensive ICE tickets have gotten... yeah I'd rather take the highway, despite that I don't like driving much.
I don't know where you drive for long car trips, but going south from e.g. Hamburg on the A1, or through the Ruhrgebiet by car is a much bigger coin flip with respect to arrival times (while always being significantly slower even on good days). So why the complains about punctionality for trains, but somehow it's fine for car travel?
The Autobahn is like a Mad Max movie nowadays. Turn signal? What's that? I'm just gonna pop into your lane when you're going 50 kph faster than me.
A old friend used to make the same argument for doubling the price of gasoline (in Germany)… something like “it will keep the rabble off the road”.
As someone who uses the German rail any time I can, I also applaud this move.
Why do you avoid the rail system?
Because waiting im Stau (traffic jam) is so much better.
Sadly related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI8PlJkqvc0
Because missing important appointment (Termin) that you have arranged 3 fucking months before by waiting in a phone queue for 30 minutes because your Sbahn was cancelled because of a nonsense signal-related reason is so much better.
Not exactly hard to nowadays in Germany
Using the rail system? Now that’s a trick and a half.
Only 62,7% of the trains were in time (and by in time they use a rigged system to count what is in time and what is not). So it's basically a 50% chance if you will be delayed at your destination or in time. Also note, that if you have to change trains mid travel you have that chance again. That means you will be late very very often. If you travel as an individual and you don't value your time at all this is a great deal, if you travel for business purposes good luck to you.
Apart from that, it's a lot more stressful (and time consuming) to go to a train station and leave at a train station instead of just driving by car.
Punctuality of local trains is much higher than the long distance ones whose stats you’re quoting here. For rapid transit, punctuality is less of an issue, compared to frequency.
I can fully relate. No one wants to travel in these unreliable, piss-stinking trains full of drunken criminals and islamists.
Congrats, now you just need to be on board when tax money is used for that infra. I bet that latest there your opposition starts.
Am i a communist when i prefer a government to operate and provide basic services like the public transport system, the postal system, the telecommunication/internet service or prisons either paid by taxes or by fees, that don't generate profit beyond paying the costs, instead of using taxes to rescue bankrupt banks and companies?
EDIT: Oh and hospitals!
> Am i a communist
Even if you were, is that really a bad thing? Why do we demonize communism (and socialism ) so much ?
Poor implementation in Soviet Union or in PRC that is only seen through the color of propaganda with the inherent cultural and ideological biases is hardly a good basis for judging a movement that was a response to centuries of extreme worker exploitation in direct result industrialization and raise of machines.
Are there really bad ideas in socialism ? yes of course, there are bad ideas in late stage capitalism or in any free market system or any system.
We learn and try to take to best from all economic systems not demonize any of them.
> Even if you were, is that really a bad thing?
I noticed, that it sounded like that after i submitted the comment. Was not intended.
> Are there really bad ideas in socialism ? yes of course, there are bad ideas in late stage capitalism or in any free market system or any system.
I totally agree.
No. That's not even socialist.
Look who is putting out this propaganda and who is funding them and then you will understand why they MUST sell this ticket as a success… With the high amount of tax money Germany collects from their slaves (almost 50%) we should have mobile phone coverage everywhere. Truth is there is no network on most high traffic railway tracks. You can’t have a phone call without interruption of signal loss when traveling with Deutsche Bahn. They also have no WiFi on the trains, toilets are broken and rarely anything is on time. They wanted to become more reliable but they postponed this goal to 2070!!!
Which I as a German simply fail to fathom. The quality of our Deutsche Bahn is so bad I would never drive by train. The worst thing is that they are incapable to have their trains be on time. Whenever you travel there is an extremely high chance you will not arrive at your destination in time.
Not every trip is time sensitive, most trains do run on time, and not all trains are operated by your nemesis. If you still refuse to "ever" take a train anywhere, that's on you rather than the system
Because it is a regional problem and some areas work mostly fine. I also fail to fanthom why people drive in rush hour, queuing every day for hours. Yet people do that. And people love to complain, especially those that only take trains on public holidays. But hey, here in Sweden the trains are worse than in Germany, but people complain far less and trains are full anyways.